Sanboot help

[nORKy]

Hi,

I try to boot some iso installer (windows 2008r2, debian, ..)

With sanboot ... http://

ipxe start the iso installer, but, OS doen't find its cd installer.

for exemple, when ipxe start windows2008r2.iso, windows says :
"An error occured while attempting to read the boot configuration data, File:\Boot\BCd"

For exemple, debian didn't find any CD reader to get its packages.

Thanks for your help

[robinsmidsrod]

That is completely normal. The CD is not designed to be booted off the network, and when it searches for the CD/DVD it can't find it. Only CDs that load their entire boot environment into RAM before their kernel start, or CDs specifically designed for booting off the network (e.g. NFS, iSCSI or something like that) will work.

In this iPXE script you can see how I boot various kinds of LiveCDs off the network: https://gist.github.com/2234639

It's not trivial, but it's not ridiculously hard either. The hardest one is usually Windows.

[nORKy]

Thanks you

I understand NFS for linux OS.
But, for windows, I see your exemple, but, how can you do that if your iso is not entirtrly loaded i[/code]n RAM ?

Code:

:windows7-install
set root-path ${base-iscsi}:${hostname}.boot.windows7
sanhook ${root-path} || goto failed
# Start Windows 7 installer DVD
sanboot --no-describe --drive 0x81 http://boot.smidsrod.lan/windows-7/ultimate-x64.iso || goto failed

[robinsmidsrod]

Look at the :winpe example. That one uses a smaller (~160MB) WinPE boot image that does not contain the installer, only the boot environment. You then load the installer from a normal CIFS network share. See the comments in that entry. There is also a link to a Microsoft article on how to create this smaller boot environment from your Windows install disc.

[nORKy]

ok, thanks you !

[rebit]

You can try my how-to

http://windowsdiskless.wordpress.com

With ipxe.iso