Installation of Win7 to iSCSI target on Skull Canyon NUC problem

[digitalis99]

(2017-04-24 08:42)robinsmidsrod Wrote:  ...
Wimboot can be hard to understand, as the Windows boot process is quite complicated. Hopefully you can figure out which part fails by reading this document: http://ipxe.org/appnote/wimboot_architecture
...

Thanks for the pointer to that page. I hadn't seen that yet. Yes, I am running the latest wimboot version.

The reason for this issue became clearer after reading the wimboot page a few times. Turns out that bootmgr.exe couldn't be found because the only spot that wimboot looks for it is in \Windows\Boot\PXE\bootmgr.exe of the supplied .wim. Win10PE SE doesn't put that file there...in fact, there is no "PXE" directory at all...hence the exact error message I got.

The easiest fix was to simply point wimboot directly to bootmgr.exe via another line in the boot script:

Code:

imgfetch --name bootmgr.exe bootmgr.exe bootmgr.exe

This, of course, requires a copy of bootmgr.exe to reside in the same directory as your scripts. I implemented this change, and my custom Win10PE SE build booted right up!

Thanks for the pointers, guys.

---

After finally getting my Win10PESE image to boot successfully, I added in a sanhook line to attach to an iSCSI target so I could complete a Windows install to the target. After adding the sanhook command, I'm right back to where I was before...with Windows either turning off the monitor after initial boot or simply rebooting for an unstated reason. I've tried different --drive parameters, in hopes of them not colliding with what the Win10 boot image is setting up.

So...I'm right back to where I started after all the nonsense. My two ipxe scripts are...

Install.ipxe:

Code:

#!ipxe
  
prompt -k 0x197e -t 2000 Press F12 to install Windows... || exit
sanhook --drive 0x82 iscsi:172.16.5.13::::iqn.2008-08.com.microsoft:w7temp
chain boot.ipxe

boot.ipxe:

Code:

#!ipxe
  
cpuid --ext 29
kernel wimboot
initrd Boot/bcd                     BCD
initrd Boot/boot.sdi                boot.sdi
initrd sources/boot.wim             boot.wim
imgfetch --name bootmgr.exe bootmgr.exe bootmgr.exe
boot

Again, this boots successfully if I remove the "sanhook..." line from install.ipxe. I've tried the default --drive 0x80, as well as 0x81, 0x82, and 0x84. Any new ideas to try?