iPXE handoff issues

[mcb30]

(2016-07-11 23:03)jbirlingmair Wrote:  OK, so I guess I spoke too soon.

I no longer get "A disk read error occurred." I can fully boot into the OS and use the iSCSI disk.

What I am still having trouble with is the handoff from iPXE to the CD.

OK, so we have fixed the first problem, and you are now able to use undionly.kpxe to boot from an iSCSI disk. We can now look at the second problem, which is how to perform an installation to an iSCSI disk.

Using "sanhook" and "keep-san" and then exiting back to the BIOS is not a supported method, and never will be. It may happen to work on some platforms. It's pure luck when it does, and will not be considered a bug when it doesn't. There is no way for iPXE to control what the BIOS does after iPXE exits.

The correct approach is to hook a SAN disk and then boot the installer over the network, without exiting from iPXE. There are several documented methods. For example: http://ipxe.org/howto/winpe shows you how to network boot WinPE and includes a section on installing to an iSCSI target. You can also use deployment tools such as WDS: see http://ipxe.org/howto/wds_iscsi. For Linux installations, see http://ipxe.org/howto/rh_san.

The common flow path in all of these methods is to first hook a SAN disk (via "sanhook" or via the DHCP root-path parameter) and then to run an installer (via "chain" or the DHCP filename parameter).

Hope that helps.

Michael