After "Boot from hard disk" nothing happens
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I completely understand.
I’m totally shooting in the dark as well as I don’t have anything on my side to “play” with to try replicating your issues to see if I could come up with a fix for your particular problem. I suspect you’re probably right that it’s got something to do with UEFI, and I’ve had similar issues with other systems due to UEFI. We did end up putting the system into “CSM” mode and from there the chainload method I provided you worked for us. We did, also, have to recreate the image from scratch after doing this, but it was well worth it as it’s one of our major providers of systems sending us these new systems with this issue.
I hope I’ve helped a little even if I wasn’t able to get a working solution to you yet.
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You have helped so much, even if nothing has worked so far I was able to try many different things thanks to your suggestions.
If you could be so kind as to try to help me out with one more thing–
For some reason I cannot get chainloading to work using CSM the way that everyone else has.
Do you think you could set me on the right track for how to set up my /tftpboot folder for how to use PXE without CSM i.e. in UEFI mode?
I feel like a fool because I would think that such a procedure would be written somewhere in the syslinux docs…or anywhere…but my google skills are weak because I can’t find anything of the sort.
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I’ve just tried one more thing that might help troubleshoot the problem here.
If the system boots from PXE first and fails to download anything from the TFTP server, the boot process does successfully go to the next boot device and windows loads fine.
Actually I think this information doesn’t help at all…if it attempts to boot PXE but does not do it successfully, then the process to get to the next boot device is entirely managed by the system and has nothing to do with PXE…
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Your google skills aren’t necessarily “weak”. It just not many people have had such a cause for this yet.
One of the things I’ve learned about UEFI and PXE Booting is it’s not perfected yet, so documentation is very scarce. While people have succeeded, I have yet to find an END-ALL-BE-ALL method for this. Everything I’ve tested on with EFI/UEFI doesn’t even provide a good option, to the point when I’m testing (linux only so far) UEFI imaging, I actually have to disable UEFI, upload/deploy my image, then before it restarts, re-enable EFI on the system.
I will ask a few questions first. Is there a reason you don’t want CSM at all? When you have CSM enabled, have you enabled Legacy PXE from within the BIOS?
I ask these as I don’t think we’ll be getting UEFI enabled for a little bit as even the best options I’ve found (iPXE) don’t have the greatest UEFI support yet. I’d really like to try to get regular PXE operating where you can select the menus, and then narrow down from there why your Hard drive is not booting. My guess is the append hd0 command is the root cause, but maybe it’s simpler than that. Is the Hard-drive connected on another channel bus on the mother board? Maybe on sata port 1 rather than sata port 0?
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I don’t want the CSM setting to be a certain way, I just want to find any way that it works. I think I may have exhausted my options for trying things that might work with CSM Always.
Regarding my system, I think it may not be all that configurable because it’s on the low-budget end.
If I have CSM Always, then the only choice is Legacy PXE. If CSM is set to Always then I get a two inaccessible rows below, Launch PXE OPROM – Legacy and Launch Video OPROM – Legacy.
The only other choice is CSM Never that just shows a blank space where the other sub-options were under Always.
The CSM line and a small section about secure boot that I have disabled are the only two parts of this BIOS setup that look new to me and I think might have anything to do with UEFI.
I can enable the LAN Option Rom or not, a simple enable/disable row that’s the only thing that shows whether CSM is Always or Never.
Regarding the append hd0 command, I tried a bunch of permutations. I tried append hd1 then the screen flashes briefly and the countdown restarts. My hard drive is plugged into SATA port 1 of 1-4, according to the POST.
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If CSM is disabled, can you still set LAN to “Legacy OPROM”?
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[quote=“Tom Elliott, post: 23118, member: 7271”]If CSM is disabled, can you still set LAN to “Legacy OPROM”?[/quote]
I don’t think so. If CSM is disabled then there are no visible settings for legacy anything.
That’s on the newer .B0 BIOS, and I’m pretty certain that’s how it was with the older BIOS too.
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And this is where the problem is lying? Without CSM, you can’t even see the PXE menu?, with CSM, you can see the PXE menu, but you can’t boot to the drive?
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I have only explored with CSM in depth. Without CSM, PXE does something, but it’s not working correctly.
If it attempts to boot PXE and does not reach a server (I unplugged the fog server), it times out and boots to windows.
If it attempts to boot PXE and does reach fog server, then it does something very quickly that I can’t read, then switched to booting windows.
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I’m thinking, then, that this is due to UEFI almost entirely. The LAN Card does not want to boot to “Legacy” PXE which is probably what the error is telling you. You can pause the output by hitting the PAUSE-BREAK key, to see if you can catch it before it continues onto Windows.
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[quote=“Tom Elliott, post: 23125, member: 7271”]I’m thinking, then, that this is due to UEFI almost entirely. The LAN Card does not want to boot to “Legacy” PXE which is probably what the error is telling you. You can pause the output by hitting the PAUSE-BREAK key, to see if you can catch it before it continues onto Windows.[/quote]
Does it matter what the output is? I haven’t even tried to configure fog to serve anything other than legacy PXE.
I’m not entirely sure how to begin setting up something that supports new PXE. Like you said, documentation is scarce. Can you point me in the right direction?
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The reason output is useful is it can tell what’s going wrong. It may say, not correct format which would tell us to use a newer or different file. Maybe it’s just not reaching the tftpserver for some reason, in which case it may be saying timeout or cannot load file.
Either way, outout is always useful, even if it isn’t helpful.
That being said, one resource to look at for efi pxe booting could be:
[url]https://access.redhat.com/site/documentation/en-US/Red_Hat_Enterprise_Linux/6/html/Installation_Guide/s1-netboot-pxe-config-efi.html[/url]While I don’t know all the possible methods that will get your system actually working, it’s one place to start.
