Suggested correction to ipxe forum faq

[harryc]

In robinsmidsrod's forum FAQ posting we see:

"How do I boot the Windows ISO from HTTP and install to an iSCSI volume?

Use wimboot to boot the files extracted from the Windows ISO."


This is certainly not the case for Vista x64 using sanhook to install via iscsi.

Even when:

1) the iscsi server is on a different subnet than, well, everything else except the router.
2) the sanhook reports 'ok' using chap with login username and password.
3) boot.ipxe is as described on the faq with all the content on an http server
4) for neither the pure x64 vista sp1 download nor the msdn disribution disc giving the choice of x32 or x64 sp1 and release version.
5) Latest ipxe (ipxe.dsk booted from a floppy by a vm with 2 cores and 2 processors, 1gb mem), latest wimboot.

The sypmtom is: No error messages for any of the ipxe process. Windows installer pops right up, asking for language and then giving the choice to 'install now'. After 'install now' 'please wait' appears for a few minutes, then it asks to browse for a missing driver. It gives no hint as to what driver it is that it is looking to find. The availble disks to browse are the blank ntfs partition via iscsi that was to be the install target (c, the floppy (A, and (X which is basically the whole of the tftp install directory. I tried a few directories hoping it would find the drivers it was looking for, but none ever appeared.

So, I'm suggesting the advice given on the FAQ "Use wimboot to boot the files extracted from the Windows ISO" is not accurate. Indeed it has cost me many hours of frustration.

I'm now going to try the "win pe" method, which I was hoping to avoid as Windows at present has no future beyond the legacy things given all the open source out there, as such I had no reason to go to the bother of installing all the extra machinery of Win PE.

Hope this post saves someone else my frustration. Harry

[robinsmidsrod]

Well, I guess the FAQ entry might lack some information. You can actually boot the boot.wim from the Vista install DVD, but once setup.exe starts up there is no place to find install.wim, which contains most of the files you need. boot.wim is only about 160MB, while install.wim contains the remaining 3.5GB of files. That big file is not loaded into memory, obviously. Technically it should be able to sanhook the install DVD, but there is an issue in iPXE that only one iSCSI target can be present in the iBFT at the same time. Because of that it is more advisable to create a custom WinPE image using WAIK/ADK and put the windows installer files on a SMB share and start it from there.

If you want to try and use the Vista DVD files, you should be able to press Shift-F10 once the installer is started and net use w: \\myserver\install_files to hook up the files the installer needs to complete. If you're not working to get full automation this should be enough to get going. If you want full automation you'll need to go with the custom WinPE solution documented in http://ipxe.org/howto/winpe.