[gPXE] Having trouble with windows XP diskless boot over AoE, boots fine with HDD plugged into the mainboard but Diskless bootfails

[Miller, Shao]

Good day TheMadOne,

You made three mistakes, I'm afraid:

- You missed in WinAoE's or WinVBlock's ReadMe.txt in the "TODO's, Notes
and known issues" section:

3. The driver will not work with the original drive attached. to fix
this, either remove the "group" parameter in the service entry in the
registry of the driver on which the disk is attached (for atapi this is
done on installing the AoE driver, for SATA, SCSI and others, search the
correct service), or zero out the MBR of the drive.

- You missed the second bullet on the HowTo guide[1]:

Unplug the disk containing the operating system image, and attach it to
the SAN target machine.

- You started changing things (drive letters) while things weren't right

When you originally booted and saw F:, it's a toss-up as to which disk
(local versus SAN) you were actually booted from, regardless that you
definitely used the SAN to _begin_ the boot process.  This is because
Windows looks at a signature in the MBR for each disk and compares
against what was saved earlier in the boot process from Windows'
boot-loader (NTLDR or whatever).

Try seeing if you can boot the local HDD without any gPXE or SAN action.
If you can, make a note of what drive letter you get for the system
volume.  If you really wish to repair, please report your findings.  It
might be easier to start again, keeping the above mistakes in mind.

- Shao Miller