Hello! Can you help with some PXE boot issues? *LONG*
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Hello All!
I have been a long time snooper of these forums and I haven’t been in the need of your direct help until now. I am the IT admin for a small non-profit in TN, USA that provides services to Disabled American Veterans, helping them get back on with their lives and over their issues the military left them with. I recently took over the position 8 months ago, and I have been desperately trying to find ways to help these wonderful selfless people that work there some help with their technology issues. Due to some issues revolving around money and the fact it is a non-profit, we can not afford any sort of “commercial” cloning solution. I found FOG about 3 months ago and have been working towards using it as a solution to help me keep their computers in working order.I have successfully installed and got FOG working on Ubuntu about 6 different times with various setups and help through these forums. I have also successfully cloned and imaged multiple computers with it as well (Using my Home PCs). Through a recent gracious donation from the FRIST foundation we were able to get the fund to purchase 10 new computers (I bought all the parts and assembled them myself), and here is where my problem arrives... Once I was confident that I was able to work my way around FOG and ready to go live, I created another setup off of our lowly WS2008R2 machine in HyperV. I also configured the DHCP 66 & 67 and got those working. To my delight the new computer I built booted to PXE, and I was able to register it with FOG. Everything was FINE until I told it to reboot.... It came to a black screen with "Reboot and select proper boot device" ... and a second line that offered me an option to insert the boot-able device and hit enter. I was like duh, its right there.. and I hit enter... It went through the DHCP search for the PXE again it went back to the fog screen (the one with memtest+ etc etc).... So I hit Boot From local Disk.. the same black screen appeared... this time I hit enter and it started searching for the DHCP again.. this time I hit ESC on the keyboard and it said DHCP search canceled by user, then went back to the black screen "Reboot and select proper boot device"
HELP!
Asrock FM2A75-DGS MOBO with AMD A10 processor.
UEFI BIOS 2.10 (newest)Sata HDD in IDE mode (I also tested with AHCI mode and RAID to no avail)
There is a strange entry in the boot-order list called “Windows Boot Manager” - ONLY with this option is first, or selected from F11 as boot device manually will the computer boot to Windows 7 x64.
[U][I]So after a ton of reading the last few days - there are a few options to “Fix” this but I cant seem to get enough information on how to implement the fix itself.[/I][/U]
Q1) Is there a way, to change what the first default option uses for booting? E.G. instead of localdisk0 use that “[U]windows boot manage[/U]r”
Q1a) Is there a way to tell it to auto-detect it is UEFI so it will select that? and use the localdisk0 for everyone else?
Q1b) Other ideas?Q2) Allegedly this gpxelinux can handle the UEFI stuff and fix all my problems? I have read and read multiple answers and watched videos, I have not found a strait-forward -> replace pxelinux with gpxelinux in FOG.
[B]I FOUND::[/B]
[url]http://technicality.ca/2011/10/08/windows-pe-pxe-boot-architecture-auto-detection-using-gpxelinux-0-from-syslinux/[/url]
[B]AND::[/B]
[url]http://fogproject.org/forum/threads/gpxe-help.870/[/url]
[B]AND ESPECIALLY::[/B]
[url]http://fogproject.org/forum/threads/eufi-bios-and-fog.162/[/url]
In this post AMIR mentions explaining how to set this up but never goes into detail…Q3) Allegedly I am going to need to use Chaining as well because I have some Dell Optiplex 380s that from what I read are quite hairy when it comes to another form of this boot-looping? I don’t totally understand ANY of the directions I have found…
Q4) Is there a way to alter the boot order from FOG somehow? EG the client gets the call to run a task… it changes the BIOS boot order to Boot from PXE. It boots and does its thing… FOG changes the boot order back?
I guess there is a way to kill two birds with one stone - and chain the gpxelunix WITH pxelinux with chaining to solve both these problems at once?
SO:
Can someone PLEASE give me a step by step how to implement the fix for these issues?Thank you. I hope you have enough info… and that it wasn’t too much info too lol!
A1: There is NO option for legacy BIOS with MOBO
A2: The OS MUST be installed in UEFI mode on this Machine - no other options.
A3: There are 3 partitions, all made by windows.
A4: The clone process works with clonezilla-live forward and backward
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My Virtual PC setup:
Ubuntu 12.04 LTS (all updates) and fog 0.32
~I uninstalled all the bloat stuff from Ubuntu and then installed Flash and Java6JDK. Otherwise nothing else is on machine except system packages and FOG.~
Running in HyperV on windows server 2008 R2 Standard
1 vCPU
512 MB ram
120GB HDD (I will only have 3 images total)