PXE Booting with RTL8111 undionly.kpxe hangs on initialising device

[Maikl]

Hi, I´m a newbie and wand to clone about 60 Pc´s in out scholl with the fog server. Unfortunately the PC´s mainboard is an Foxconn G41M with the RTL8111 nic which causes problems in booting with PXE. I updatet the fog-server to 1.4.2 and tried through all .kpxe files.
When I use the undionly.kpxe it hangs on initialising devices.
by using the ipxe.kpxe it initialises the hardware and starts booting. I reach the FOG-menue when the hdd is disconnected. When the hdd is connected it starts booting windows.

I can buy new nics but this is expensive for about 60 PC´s.
Wh had the same problem and was able to solve it?

[george1421]

I’m sorry I didn’t see this until now.

The realtek nics can be a real pain to deal with.

The undionly.* uses the built in driver bits in the nic. The ipxe.?pxe uses the iPXE kernel’s built in drivers. That is why you had better luck with the ipxe.?pxe kernel. There IS a realtek specific kernel, but the ipxe one is probably a good choice here.

Now I can tell you if your computers are uefi based (not legacy/bios) then you will need to use a different boot kernel for the FOG menu. You will need ipxe.efi. If you have a windows 2012 dhcp server or a linux dhcp server you can configure it to automatically send the right file name based on what the target computer is.

by using the ipxe.kpxe it initialises the hardware and starts booting. I reach the FOG-menue when the hdd is disconnected. When the hdd is connected it starts booting windows.

This doesn’t sound like you have the network adapter first in the bios then the hard drive. I can say for my company I have the hd drive only defined in the bios for booting. When a tech goes to image a computer I require them to be in front of the computer and press the F12 key while booting to get the boot menu. From there they pick the network to boot from.

[Sebastian Roth]

Yeah, George is absolutely right. Those RTL8111 are known to not properly work with UNDI (see here for example). Therefor you have to either use ipxe.* which comes with all drivers included or realtek.* which only has all the realtek drivers build in.
See if all your PCs are able to boot using the same iPXE binary. If not you need to customize your DHCP configuration to send DHCP options according to those different clients.

@Maikl said in PXE Booting with RTL8111 undionly.kpxe hangs on initialising device:

by using the ipxe.kpxe it initialises the hardware and starts booting. I reach the FOG-menue when the hdd is disconnected. When the hdd is connected it starts booting windows.

This sounds like you haven’t changed boot order in BIOS. Please check.

[Sebastian Roth]

@Maikl Any news on this?