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Haider Abdullah
Asked: 2017-03-14 22:08:35 +0800 CST

Installing windows OS on iSCSI san storage using iPXE BOOT

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Captured boot up process

I'm trying to make a diskless PC client and install the operating system on a SAN Storage. As of now I'm using Windows Server 2012 R2 and it will serve as my DHCP/WDS and SAN server.

I found a video from yourtube on "Bjørn Jentoft" channel with the title "Hyper-V: Windows installation to ISCSI disk". I followed all the steps and configurations but it didn't quite work for me.

I keep repeating his video to see if I missed something on the configuration steps, but when I checked everything it appears that I didn't miss anything based on what he showed on the video tutorial.

By the way he used HYPER-V on his tutorial and I'm using physical machines.

iscsi pxe-boot windows-server-2012-r2 wds ipxe

2 Answers

  1. I’ve read about different successful iPXE implementations with StarWind iSCSI target, but haven't tested myself yet.

    Here is an article that you may find helpfull: https://jonmccune.wordpress.com/2011/12/19/diskless-windows-7-with-iscsi-and-gpxe/

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  2. Message show in the image is: tftp://192.168.1.1/client1.txt... No such file or directory (http://ipxe.org/2d12603b)

    So the file "does not exist" on the tftp server and following that link there is some suggestions:

    • Check that you are attempting to download the correct file.
    • Check that you can retrieve the file using an alternative TFTP client, such as tftp-hpa on Linux.

    My suggestion in a case like this is to check the tftp servers log, or resort to packet dumps (for example with wireshark) to see what is going on.

    In this case my guess is on that Windows TFTP server has not been configured to allow that path. Normally it only accepts paths that starts with Boot, see this documentation: http://ipxe.org/appnote/chainload_wds

    And here is a guide for what seems to be exactly this scenario: http://ipxe.org/howto/wds_iscsi

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