fog iso booting

[badhonsoam]

I was trying to boot linux iso using memdisk . but it is not working . i need to boot linux and windows in the for boot menu for clean installing.can any help me with configuration . can it be done in GUI.

[george1421]

@quazz I currently have a colon : isolating the host name and the path in my configuration. I can boot into the Win10 recovery properly. I’m suspecting the files are not in that directory or the permissions are set such as to not allow access via NFS. Either way this process will not give the OP what he wants. Will it boot the recovery program, Yes. Will it allow a complete restore, No. The swim files are still on the FOG server with no way for the recovery program to access them. I’m not done with the document yet, but it looks like Win10 will have to follow the same process as Win7 with a WinPE environment connecting to a network share to run the setup.exe program to install Win7/Win10.

ref: https://forums.fogproject.org/topic/10944/using-fog-to-pxe-boot-into-your-favorite-installer-images/10

[Quazz]

I could be wrong, but I believe that you have to use a different format for the NFS urls

nfs://server-address/images/os/etc

instead of

nfs://server-address:/images/os/etc

Confusion coming of course from the fact that when you try to mount a NFS path like so

mount server-address:/images/os/etc /mnt/image

iPXE website seems to confirm this

http://ipxe.org/gsoc/nfs

[badhonsoam]

@george1421 i did follow steps properly. i did step 2 properly.

[george1421]

@badhonsoam I would start with making sure this file exists /images/os/mswindows/10-1607/bootmgr.exe That is the error wimboot appears to load OK so you have the mswindows directory created correctly. The error is that it can’t download bootmgr.exe. It uses the same protocol as wimboot. Also check your permissions on bootmgr.exe make sure it is readable.

Based on the error, I might think you skipped step 2 in the instructions.

Lastly let me say these instructions won’t get you an installable image. The recover manager does run but when you go to access the wim image to push it to the target hard drive it will fail. The notes from that tutorial also says it doesn’t work.

The windows 7 post is closer to giving a functional install of Win10. You must build the WinPE iso as instructed by the Win7 post. The second thing you need is to install SAMBA on your FOG server to give the WinPE ISO the ability to connect to the media. I completed the post for installing SAMBA on Centos friday night. I still need to create the instructions for Ubuntu. I will do that as time permits.

Something I need to know from you. When you copied the Windows 10 disk image to the fog server, is there a setup.exe in the root of the dvd image [/images/os/mswindows/10-1607/]?

[badhonsoam]

@sebastian-roth sorry. i was going to post. sorry for delay. i follow this

1. First we’ll create the required directories:
   mkdir /images/os/mswindows
   mkdir /images/os/mswindows/10-1607
   mkdir /tftpboot/mswindows
   mkdir /tftpboot/mswindows/10-1607
2. Now we’ll mount the Windows 10 iso over the loop directory. Then we’ll copy the contents of the DVD to the directory we built above.
   mount -o loop /{full path where you have the iso stored}/DellWin10OEM.iso /mnt/loop

cp -R /mnt/loop/* /images/os/mswindows/10-1607
umount /mnt/loop
3. Download and install the latest wimboot kernel and extract it from the zip file.
cd /images/os/mswindows
wget http://git.ipxe.org/releases/wimboot/wimboot-latest.zip
unzip wimboot-latest.zip
4. Copy the wimboot file from the archive directory to root of the mswindows directory (we’ll need this for every windows boot media, so we’ll place it in a common spot).
cp ./wimboot-2.6.0-signed/wimboot /images/os/mswindows
5. The last bit of magic we need to do is setup a new FOG iPXE boot menu entry for this OS.
6. In the fog WebGUI go to FOG Configuration->iPXE New Menu Entry
Set the following fields
Menu Item: os.Win10-1607
Description: Windows 10 v1607
Parameters:
kernel nfs://192.168.2.110:/images/os/mswindows/wimboot
initrd nfs://192.168.2.110:/images/os/mswindows/10-1607/bootmgr.exe bootmgr.exe
initrd nfs://192.168.2.110:/images/os/mswindows/10-1607/boot/bcd bcd
initrd nfs://192.168.2.110:/images/os/mswindows/10-1607/boot/fonts/segmono_boot.ttf segmono_boot.ttf
initrd nfs://192.168.2.110:/images/os/mswindows/10-1607/boot/fonts/segoe_slboot.ttf segoe_slboot.ttf
initrd nfs://192.168.2.110:/images/os/mswindows/10-1607/boot/fonts/segoen_slboot.ttf segoen_slboot.ttf
initrd nfs://192.168.2.110:/images/os/mswindows/10-1607/boot/fonts/wgl4_boot.ttf wgl4_boot.ttf
initrd nfs://192.168.2.110:/images/os/mswindows/10-1607/boot/boot.sdi boot.sdi
initrd -n boot.wim nfs://192.168.2.110:/images/os/mswindows/10-1607/sources/BOOT.wim boot.wim
imgstat
boot || goto MENU
Menu Show with: All Hosts
.
and getting this error

[Sebastian Roth]

@badhonsoam What exactly have you tried this time and what error did you get?

You need to understand that it’s impossible for us to help if we only know “is not working”…

[badhonsoam]

@george1421 this is not working. not geting on boot

[george1421]

@badhonsoam This post should work for you, or at least give you a starting point for your testing: https://forums.fogproject.org/topic/10944/using-fog-to-pxe-boot-into-your-favorite-installer-images/10

[george1421]

@badhonsoam Within my company we don’t install windows by pxe booting or using an iso image. We use MDT to build our reference image so I’ve no need to boot into windows this way. I do have an old way using winpe that I have documented here: https://forums.fogproject.org/topic/7765/pxe-booting-into-ms-windows-7-setup

I’m looking into adding windows booting to my current tutorial I posted in this tread. I don’t know if its possible to do without winpe. So stay tuned. I’m currently working with a Dell Win10 OEM disk to see if I can boot into the OS. I’m still several hours (days) away from seeing if that will work. If it fails, the winpe way will work (maybe).

[badhonsoam]

@george1421 did u boot windows OS? can it be done without winpe? can u
direct me?

[KnightRaven]

@badhonsoam
So this is the attempt from awhile back at getting Windows to boot:
fog pxe/iPxe boot win 7 wimboot CD/DVD missing issue
You must use WinPE to boot. You can download it here.
Or just google/search windows ADK.
Once you have that installed you can make the WinPE boot ISO.
Also once you have that, you can copy any normal Win install to a share and use its setup. The instructions(and what we found) should all be in the original link I posted.
I think @george1421 may have a better/cleaner tutorial somewhere. Or someone did at one time. But this should get you in the right directon.

[badhonsoam]

@knightraven thx. how will get windows. it need ramdisk. i think. if i donot want to use winpxe.

[Quazz]

You should also note that memdisk requires (quite a bit) more than the ISO size of RAM in order to function. You’ll notice most ISOs people are booting to be 500MB or more often less.

Think of it this way: it basically emulates the optical drive in memory, but after that it still needs to access it, read the files and load the ones it needs into memory (meaning they are there effectively twice), it generally doesn’t load every file to boot from ISO, but it is something to consider.

[KnightRaven]

@george1421
You’re are welcome to use anything of mine. In fact I think you helped get the windows boot working awhile back. I’ve borrowed and tweaked just a bit from sources here at Fog anyway myself.

I have to much going on right now to test what I posted but I know it has worked. My current location has a bare bones setup just for deploying an image. I haven’t had time to setup the advanced menu items(well the actual files anyway).

[george1421]

@knightraven If you don’t mind I’b going to borrow this for the tutorial I’m working on.

[george1421]

https://forums.fogproject.org/topic/10944/using-fog-to-pxe-boot-into-your-favorite-installer-images

For centos that works

[KnightRaven]

In my Fog Config, Advanced Menu settings I have these line items for calling windows install and Linux boot…

:Win7pex64
initrd http://${fog-ip}/opt/Win7/ISO/winpe_amd64.iso
#prompt
chain memdisk iso raw || goto MENU
boot

:mint18_64
kernel http://${fog-ip}/opt/mint/18.1-cinnamon-64bit/casper/vmlinuz
initrd http://${fog-ip}/opt/mint/18.1-cinnamon-64bit/casper/initrd.lz
imgargs vmlinuz root=/dev/nfs boot=casper netboot=nfs nfsroot=${fog-ip}/var/www/html/opt/mint/18.1-cinnamon-64bit/ locale=en_US.UTF-8 keyboard-configuration/layoutcode=us mirror/country=US
boot || goto failed
goto start

Obviously you will need to setup matching locations with proper rights. There are articles, threads, etc that can help. I think Tom already listed some.
getting rights and NFS all to cooperate was the trickiest part.

For Windows you MUST use the WinPE version. I tried to use a standard USB bootable and did not work. Had to be PE.

For linux I just used a version of mint. Had to use it extracted. As in not the iso and link to the boot files.

Now there were some changes to Apache(at least Fog’s implementation) as well that may affect the path(s) you can use. To be honest I haven’t tried this in awhile. You may have to tweak your paths to work or Apache settings.

Jason

[badhonsoam]

@george1421 i give more ram then iso. i provide 1 GB the 3 gb ram. my iso size is 800 mb.

[badhonsoam]

@quazz then what will be the parameter for windows and linux in new ipxe entry.