[gPXE] Only register bios drive without booting

[Michael Brown]

On Tuesday 23 March 2010 18:09:12 Andrey Kuzmin wrote:
> > The simplest thing to do is
> > - to have one HDD in the computer system
> > - installed Windows 7 to it
> > - make sure networking is fully functional
> > - make sure an iSCSI test succeeds to validate your iSCSI target setup
> > - remove the HDD and either attach it to your iSCSI target system or
> > take a raw HDD image and serve that from the iSCSI target system
>
> No much luck yet. So what I did:
>
> 1)  Deleted  all partitions from 160Gb drive and installed win 7 to it
> with automatic partitioning
> 2)  Launched  iscsi  initiator on fresh Win7, this enabled iSCSI service
> and I've found LUNs on iscsitarget in initiator
> 3)  Shutdown,  attached  HDD  to  iscsitarget  server  and setup iscsi
> LUN as blockio
> 4)  Diskless  PC  started  to  boot successfully from iSCSI target, at
> least Starting Windows appears
> 5) After 1-2 minutes windows logo was shown
> 6)  From  this  time  I  see no any activity in dstat on iscsi target.
> Diskless PC waits for 3-4 minutes and reboots.

It may be that your NIC is not marked as boot-start.  (I don't remember 
off-hand whether or not Win7 handles this automatically when you don't use an 
explicit install direct to iSCSI.)

You may have some luck by installing sanbootconf before attaching the HDD to 
the iSCSI target server.  Even if it doesn't make it work, you will at least 
get some sensible debug messages you can view via windbg.

Michael