@george1421

IT WORKS NOW!!! Is it too early to celebrate with a beer?

I made a few changes in the BIOS of my host - mainly disabling CSM. I think turning that off, in combination with updating the files you mentioned in my pfSense DHCP server finally did it.

When I check the platform type with the default.ipxe script I now get the proper response, efi.

Now I can start testing this on some other hardware types and see how it goes. I really can’t say thank you enough, @george1421 @Sebastian-Roth you guys have been extremely helpful.

I thought I saw a forum post regarding this issue a bit ago but could not find it with a quick search, so if this is a double post my apologies.

Anyway I have been having some issues after fog deployments to single hosts. The deployment goes fine and the drive is written as expected, but for some reason my boot priorities change and pxe boot is no longer the first priority.

In some cases, not only is the boot priority changed, but CSM has been re-enabled on the host motherboard as well. The image I am deploying to the host is an ubuntu image if that matters.

Anyone else see this behavior?

@george1421

IT WORKS NOW!!! Is it too early to celebrate with a beer?

I made a few changes in the BIOS of my host - mainly disabling CSM. I think turning that off, in combination with updating the files you mentioned in my pfSense DHCP server finally did it.

When I check the platform type with the default.ipxe script I now get the proper response, efi.

Now I can start testing this on some other hardware types and see how it goes. I really can’t say thank you enough, @george1421 @Sebastian-Roth you guys have been extremely helpful.

@Sebastian-Roth

My bad if I made that confusing, when I refer to host I mean the computer that I am trying to boot up using PXE/Fog. The actual Fog client is not the host, although coincidentally its running on an ubuntu server as well.

Just ran the debug task, once I got to a linux shell the efi directory did NOT exist. Only directories in /sys/firmware were acpi, dmi, and memmap.

@george1421

Haha ok, I won’t point the finger at iPXE. Just didn’t see the result I was expecting there.

As far as the pfSense DHCP settings, no I did not have those ipxe.efi files in the 32 and 64 bit sections. I have changed that now and attached a picture of the config.

Here is a link to the pcap as well.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1tYG7Klc5OGYMeZJTocrV73uvkWs6FftK/view?usp=sharing

@george1421

@george1421 said in Cannot exit IPXE menu and boot from hard drive?:

@wmw509 said in Cannot exit IPXE menu and boot from hard drive?:

Seems like refind might not be what was causing me problems after all

As long as the platform == pcbios then is working on the bios side, but that doesn’t follow through with what you reported from inside ubuntu. Are you working with multiple hardware? OR is iPXE misreporting the platform?

I could be wrong, but I believe iPXE is misreporting the platform. For these tests today I did a fresh new Ubuntu 18.04 install on the host, so no hardware has been changed and it appears to be efi according to ubuntu.

OK I’m trying to think how this is possible (ipxe reporting pcbios and ubuntu reporting efi). I think I might have an idea.

There are some firmware that are dynamic depending on the boot media they will dynamically switch between bios and uefi mode depending on what they detect. If the boot media is bios based then they will switch into bios mode, if the firmware detects a efi boot media they will switch into uefi mode. There is no firmware switch its all dynamic.

I kind of follow you on this, but am a little confused. I was under the impression that most major linux distribution installers were the dynamic part and would detect what the host system supported and use that method to install?

So lets assume you are pxe booting this computer and you send unidonly.kpxe to this computer. This computer will see, oh that’s a bios boot loader and boot it in bios mode. FOG Imaging will work just fine in bios mode and you can deploy a uefi image with FOG Imaging in bios mode. Then after the imaging reboot, again you send undionly.kpxe to the target computer. Again it sees that is a bios boot loader so it switches to bios mode. So now you are in the iPXE menu and the menu times out to boot to the disk, but SANBOOT hangs because its trying to chain to a bios mode disk, but the disk contains a uefi boot loader. When you change the boot order so the disk is first in the order, the firmware looks to see the disk is a uefi disk and switches to uefi mode and boots from the hard drive.

This certainly sounds like the behavior I am getting!

I think this is how iPXE (undionly.kpxe) is reporting pcbios yet the actual OS is uefi. There is a lot of suppositions here, but it make a logical connection.

So what specifically do you have configured for dhcp option 67?

I am using pfSense for the DHCP server and option 67 is set to unidonly.kpxe.

@JJ-Fullmer

No worries! The files were actually names the same as they are in Fog in one of the packages I installed. It was just that refind.efi that threw me for a bit of a loop.

Seems like refind might not be what was causing me problems after all

@Sebastian-Roth

Once the changes were made in that script the host booted (unsuccessfully of course) but it displayed the following.

builtin/platform:string = pcbios

This is a bit above my head so forgive me if this is a stupid question, but if I expect to use Fog with only UEFI systems could I hardcode this somehow? Any other ideas?

@Sebastian-Roth

Aha, that makes sense, thank you.

I have noticed some other potentially weird behavior in my attempts at getting this working. When I have been testing my Boot Exit Settings I have been testing each available selection for both EFI and non-EFI exit methods. I have gotten a few different results as I have done this, but it seems that Fog might be trying to use my non-EFI exit method even though I am definitely on a UEFI system.

If I leave the non-efi boot exit setting as SANBOOT for example, no matter what my efi boot exit setting are the host will always end up hanging with a blinking cursor in the top corner. Is it possible Fog (or my settings of Fog/the host) are causing some confusion as to what method to use?

@JJ-Fullmer

Thanks for your reply, that post looks very similar to my issue. I am attempting to get those binaries right now but am a little confused about what files are needed specifically. The binaries in the /fog/service/ipxe directory are…
refind_aa64.efi
refind.efi
refind_ia32.efi
refind_x64.efi

The files I found after decompressing the files from sourceforge are below…
refind_x64.efi
refind_ia32.efi
refind_aa64.efi

I do not see a refind.efi file in any of the sourceforge downloads. Is this file needed/used by fog? If so, any ideas where it is?

@george1421

This host just has a single 60gb SATA drive. Here’s how the partitions look…

Device Start End Sectors Size Type
/dev/sda1 2048 1050623 1048576 512M EFI System
/dev/sda2 1050624 3151359 2100736 1G Linux filesystem
/dev/sda3 3151360 117231103 114079744 54.4G Linux filesystem