iscsi with gpxe (windows 7) - not booting

hmm, I didn't think it was possible to run windows diskless since like windows 95.

Have you got this to work before (diskless windows) with anything else?

It is - but the issue I had was after I put in the "set keep-san 1" into the gpxe script, the win7 installation didn't have a driver for my NIC, so I lost the connection... :(

Matt

Sorry to dig up an "old" thread, but I came across it while googling and figured it might help others. This is 100% possible, but will take an investment (a few hours) Assuming you can get your NIC working, here are the steps you must take:

0. Start out with a blank iSCSI target
1. Create PXE bootable Windows PE (follow these instructions to a T http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc722358%28WS.10%29.aspx)
2. Share those files out via TFTP
3. Boot GPXE and do the following:
Ctrl-B into command line
dhcp net0
set keep-san 1
sanboot iscsi:192.168.1.11::::iqn.2007-08.name.dns.target.my:iscsiboot
chain tftp://192.168.1.11/boot/pxeboot.n12

Now if you've done everything right so far, Windows PE will be loading.

4. Map shared folder where Windows installation files are: "net use s: \\server\cdrom" or whatever

5. Run s:\setup.exe

6. Thank me - this took me a few hours to put all of the pieces together!

Note, you MUST use Windows PE to do the installation. This wasn't the case for everything before (Vista, XP etc.) If you try to skip the PE step and straight boot to Windows 7 setup you'll see the iscsi drive as an installation option but it errors out. I lost many hours to that problem!

Hi All,

I am trying to boot via iscsi from my Readynas Pro 6 via gPXE, my fw on readynas is 4.2.21

I'm seeing this issue when i open the syslog on the nas:
Aug 11 14:27:39 KDNAS kernel: No response for proposed key "ImmediateData".
Aug 11 14:27:39 KDNAS last message repeated 5 times
Aug 11 14:27:39 KDNAS kernel: MAX_LOGIN_PDUS count reached.
Aug 11 14:27:39 KDNAS kernel: iSCSI Login negotiation failed.

I can mount iscsi luns no problem from my desktop / laptops to the readynas..

The ietd.conf from the readynas is as below:

Target iqn.2012-08.KDNAS:esx4i
Lun 0 Path=/c/.iscsi/esx4i~0,Type=fileio,ScsiSN=RN20BRG00224-002,IOMode=wb
# desc esx4i 0 esx4i
HeaderDigest CRC32,None
DataDigest CRC32,None

my script for gpxe is as follows:

#!gpxe
ifopen net0
set net0/ip 10.10.8.253
set net0/netmask 255.255.255.0
set net0/gateway 10.10.8.1
set net0/dns 10.10.8.1
set keep-san 1
sanboot iscsi:10.10.8.99::3260:0:iqn.2012-08.KDNAS:esx4i

when gpxe boots from my usb, I get the message "could not initialise ISCSI device" and the logs as per above are seen in syslog on the nas..

I've researched this to a similar issue users had on a qnap device here:
http://forum.qnap.com/viewtopic.php?p=129084

Now, i'm not really a huge linux guru and looking at this post, i've got to go build a linux vm (i don't have one currently), download a load of packages and frig about with an iscsi.c file and recompile for gpxe..

has anyone come across this issue on their readynas? if anyone has a way for sorting this out without doing the recompile of this file i would really appreciate it.. or failing that, explain in english without the assumed linux knowledge from a scratch vanilla build of ubuntu so i can sort it out myself..

thanks guys,

K