ipxe Boot Windows 10 Installer

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cperalt1

Active Member
Feb 23, 2015
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Does anyone have a working configuration for boot the windows 10 installer over ipxe. I have tried

(I can get to the installer this way but fails at looking for drivers)
initrd bootmgr bootmgr
initrd boot/bcd BCD
initrd boot/boot.sdi boot.sdi
initrd sources/boot.wim boot.wim
chain wimboot || goto failed
goto start



Also via memdisk load (Fails at iso load with message No Space Left on Device.)

initrd http://192.168.1.10/win10ent.iso
chain http://192.168.1.10/memdisk iso raw || goto failed

All of this is done in a vm in Hyper-V with 10gb of ram so enough ram to load iso.
 
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cperalt1

Active Member
Feb 23, 2015
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Thanks I have tried Wimboot as well as Sanboot and have mapped the installer from a share from wimpe and that still didn't work. Thanks. My Windows iso is from MSDN.
 
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pricklypunter

Well-Known Member
Nov 10, 2015
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One crazy idea might be a "proof of the pudding/ concept" type thing. Have you tried something else to pxe boot/ deploy. Maybe something like Serva? or doing it the hard way with the WAIK/ WinPE. If you can get it working that way, you might get some more ideas by watching the traffic crossing the network? It may be crap, just some more ideas I'm tossing out...
 

Chuntzu

Active Member
Jun 30, 2013
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I have a working config with ipxe. I chain load wds from it and install windows from there. To get windows 10 to install you have to install to a drive then copy the drive with disk to vhd (disk2vhd is the tool to use and save the virtual drive to vhdx). But before you copy the drive you need to set the boot flag in the registry to 0 for all the nics drivers you are using is e1express (something like that) for intel and mlnx for mellanox. Once copied to the iscsi server then assign it to a iscsi target and use an ipxe script to create a menu and assign target to initiator and boom. After the first few Installs for different hardware you will find most of the steps really boring and will want to script it with power shell. Windows 8 you can install directly to iscsi and not mess with all that installing to drive nonsense. Server 2012r2 seemed to require the same install to drive and then copy over nonsense. I am sure there is a way to automate this with winpe and some XML file to presetup this boot flag during normal install but I haven't spent much time trying g to figure it out. For extra fun setup a syspreped image with drivers maintained and you can use a differencing disk to have each subsequent node boot from the golden image and save a ton of space. Without as a side note (and you have to dig through ipxe forum to finally read about this) will not load any install files like the normal Image/ISO would dispite from the image they show in the walk through indicate that the install shows which versions of Windows to install. You actually have to run commands to connect to a samba share and then initiate the install from those shares from with winpe. It was super annoying finding this out and is why I use wds with ipxe because it just works better and is plenty fast at installing images.

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Chuntzu

Active Member
Jun 30, 2013
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One crazy idea might be a "proof of the pudding/ concept" type thing. Have you tried something else to pxe boot/ deploy. Maybe something like Serva? or doing it the hard way with the WAIK/ WinPE. If you can get it working that way, you might get some more ideas by watching the traffic crossing the network? It may be crap, just some more ideas I'm tossing out...
Very cool alternative tool to use when wds is not available.


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cperalt1

Active Member
Feb 23, 2015
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Thanks, I tried mapping the Samba share and the install still didn't want to go through. I guess I have to either actually create a Win10 Windows PE since I just tried using the install ISO and starting from a Win7 PE image I already had created. In my environment I'm just trying to get everything ready for rapid reinstalls since I'm only responsible for 50 workstations I wasn't looking at setting up a WDS since I'm running my subnet's infrastructure off of SmartOS zones since I don't actually control the network. iPXE is offered via proxyDHCP. Not having set-up WDS before any pointers as to what I should do to deploy Win10 this way? Thanks.
 

Zack Hehmann

Member
Feb 6, 2016
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I am not too familiar with the commands you are using. I +1 to the serva idea. It's a fantastic product and I use it at home. I have not tried it with a VM or Windows 10. I used it to install Windows 7 with a HP elitebook 840 G1. I had injected the correct drivers for the network card, however they still wouldn't work. I never figured it out why they wouldn't work. I think I ended up copying the boot.wim from an 8.1 ISO.

I don't know if that's an option for you? I believe their paid-for version is fairly inexpensive. Another resource you could try is spiceworks. Let us know how things go. If I get some time I can try and PXE boot with a Windows 10 msdn ISO and let you know.