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<tt>Joakim Schicht wrote:<br>
</tt>
<blockquote type="cite"><tt>I am fiddling with WAN (HTTP) booting of
"Universal XP". By wimbooting xp, we can enjoy great compression and
faster image transfer (my rather complete XP SP2 with all services
intact, is only 209 Mb after finally being zipped).<br>
</tt></blockquote>
<tt>Interesting. How exactly are you accomplishing this? What exactly
are you downloading via HTTP? I was under the impression that the
entirety of XP could not be in a .WIM file and be bootable, though you
can attach a .WIM file at some point during boot. If you have a
relevant link to your setup over at the Boot-Land forums, perhaps you
would kindly reply with such a link here for other interested gPXE
Windows XP users?<br>
<br>
For comparison, I have a 204 MB XP SP2 HDD image which I boot using
MEMDISK and WinVBlock. Each computer which boots this image is
licensed for a single installation of Windows XP SP2. The BOOT.INI
menu offers all kernel and HAL combinations, so the image will boot on
any hardware platform with enough RAM. 256 MB is enough to run, but
many programs cannot allocate memory and have quirks; CMD.EXE is fine.
In this scenario, I have gPXE attach to a read-only SAN. That SAN has
a FAT32 partition and SYSLINUX installed onto it. SYSLINUX boots and
loads MEMDISK along with the "RamXP" HDD image. The fact that gPXE
uses iSCSI to read this SAN results in significantly faster transfer
times than HTTP, but obviously is not quite as universal as HTTP
allowances in the world.<br>
<br>
</tt>
<blockquote type="cite" cite="mid:SNT102-W196BC9600D61D44F08034FB2970@phx.gbl">
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--></style><tt>But
using another stack than gPXE in the same environment (even with no
physical nic connected) will not trigger this stall behaviour. Which
leads me to think that it could be some weird combination.<br>
</tt></blockquote>
<tt>Using another stack, how are you downloading via HTTP?<br>
</tt>
<blockquote type="cite" cite="mid:SNT102-W196BC9600D61D44F08034FB2970@phx.gbl"><tt>Either way, it is definately a vmware-related issue.<br>
</tt></blockquote>
<tt>If gPXE is really behaving differently than some other PXE stack
which accomplishes decent HTTP download behaviour, it would still be
good to know why.<br>
<br>
- Shao Miller<br>
</tt>
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