How to boot windows 7 over iscsi with different hardware

OSR_Community_User · July 23, 2013, 4:49am

Hi,

As the title suggests, I’m looking for something that will help me to boot windows7 over iscsi with different NIC.

Here’s the current situation,

I’ve iscsi set-up on ubuntu server edition with dhcp server up and running on it. All the settings related with the dhcp configuration have been taken care of (You can be sure of this).

Windows 7 has been installed on the iscsi disk thr’ some particular machine (it’s basically a thin-client, let’s say x1). It has drivers corresponding to NIC of this machine. So this way I have a windows7 iscsi image and I can diskless boot from this image from the machine (x1) as many times as I want to without any problem and everything works fine.

Problem is when I try to boot from some completely different machine (say, thin-client, x2-with different NIC than x1), the booting process halts at “Starting Windows” windows logo.

The microsft hotfix works when ALL NIC going to be used to boot from iSCSI are present in computer. How to add NIC when it?s different brand (the one which was not present during iSCSI installation)?

You can conisder the scenario where 2nd machine is just a clone of 1st machine. And while booting from 2nd machine I’m just changing the NIC thr’ hypervisor settings. Do I need to write some driver which will enable me achieve this? If yes, what its functionality should be? Have there been any previous successful attempts at this? (As per my reasearch, there haven’t been any, not counting the commercial ones.)

This question may seem like a bit out of place for NTDEV but after several weeks of unsuccessful research & tryouts I thought this would be the best place to get further info.

Jan_Bottorff · July 23, 2013, 8:06am

I know exactly what he issues is. It’s not really fixable in Win 7, and I don’t know if it’s improved or not in Win 8.

Basically, when you boot on different hardware, the OS needs to install the new NIC drivers, and installing NIC drivers requires running the user mode network class installer. You can’t run the user mode network class installer unless you can boot, access the system disk, and run user mode code, so you have a chicken and egg problem that has no good solution. Other kinds of storage than software iSCSI, can have the minimal drivers installed without running any user mode code (using the critical device database).

Your best bet might be to write a WinPE repair script/program. When the OS can’t boot after migrating to different hardware, it will often attempt boot repair by booting a copy of WinPE from a ramdisk. Last I knew, the default boot repair does not fix iSCSI boot disks. The boot to WinPE is done by iSCSI BIOS (or I supposed the UEFI equivalent, or something like gPXE/iPXE chain loading via PXE) loading of the WinPE ramdisk. Once WinPE is running, you can do device detection, install of the correct NIC drivers, and then you will need to clone that driver install info into the real boot disk, which is not a documented procedure. If this all worked correctly, when you reboot again, the real OS will have the correct NIC drivers loaded.

I believe I know the patch you’re talking about, and believe that only works if it’s the same hardware kind in the same slot. When by default they used PCIe serial numbered based PnP instance naming, it became a problem when moving images between identical servers or when hardware had to be replaced due to failures. The need for serial number based instance ids was partially due to servers with dynamically created PCIe devices, as a device might dynamically be added that changed the PCIe BDF of a boot device, but it’s serial number was stable.

A number of people have looked into this some years ago there was a discussion thread on a gPXE (now iPXE) forum.

The easy solution is boot a thin client that talks via remote desktop to a server running a Windows 7 VM.

Jan

-----Original Message-----
From: xxxxx@lists.osr.com [mailto:xxxxx@lists.osr.com] On Behalf Of xxxxx@hotmail.com
Sent: Tuesday, July 23, 2013 1:49 AM
To: Windows System Software Devs Interest List
Subject: [ntdev] How to boot windows 7 over iscsi with different hardware

Hi,

As the title suggests, I’m looking for something that will help me to boot windows7 over iscsi with different NIC.

Here’s the current situation,

I’ve iscsi set-up on ubuntu server edition with dhcp server up and running on it. All the settings related with the dhcp configuration have been taken care of (You can be sure of this).

Windows 7 has been installed on the iscsi disk thr’ some particular machine (it’s basically a thin-client, let’s say x1). It has drivers corresponding to NIC of this machine. So this way I have a windows7 iscsi image and I can diskless boot from this image from the machine (x1) as many times as I want to without any problem and everything works fine.

Problem is when I try to boot from some completely different machine (say, thin-client, x2-with different NIC than x1), the booting process halts at “Starting Windows” windows logo.

The microsft hotfix works when ALL NIC going to be used to boot from iSCSI are present in computer. How to add NIC when it?s different brand (the one which was not present during iSCSI installation)?

You can conisder the scenario where 2nd machine is just a clone of 1st machine. And while booting from 2nd machine I’m just changing the NIC thr’ hypervisor settings. Do I need to write some driver which will enable me achieve this? If yes, what its functionality should be? Have there been any previous successful attempts at this? (As per my reasearch, there haven’t been any, not counting the commercial ones.)

This question may seem like a bit out of place for NTDEV but after several weeks of unsuccessful research & tryouts I thought this would be the best place to get further info.

NTDEV is sponsored by OSR

Visit the list at: http://www.osronline.com/showlists.cfm?list=ntdev

OSR is HIRING!! See http://www.osr.com/careers

For our schedule of WDF, WDM, debugging and other seminars visit:
http://www.osr.com/seminars

To unsubscribe, visit the List Server section of OSR Online at http://www.osronline.com/page.cfm?name=ListServer

amitr0-2 · July 23, 2013, 9:01am

hi Jan,

wont running sysprep work? Assuming that at shutdown time the OP triggered
sysprep and shutdown the OS, then booted off of it sysprep should trigger a
hardware detection and installation.

Alternatively, in WinPE if the OP makes the sysprep related changes, and
reboots the OS it should also trigger the same functionality.

I am not sure though if sysprep works over iSCSI but it should…

On Tue, Jul 23, 2013 at 5:35 PM, Jan Bottorff wrote:

> I know exactly what he issues is. It’s not really fixable in Win 7, and I
> don’t know if it’s improved or not in Win 8.
>
> Basically, when you boot on different hardware, the OS needs to install
> the new NIC drivers, and installing NIC drivers requires running the user
> mode network class installer. You can’t run the user mode network class
> installer unless you can boot, access the system disk, and run user mode
> code, so you have a chicken and egg problem that has no good solution.
> Other kinds of storage than software iSCSI, can have the minimal drivers
> installed without running any user mode code (using the critical device
> database).
>
> Your best bet might be to write a WinPE repair script/program. When the OS
> can’t boot after migrating to different hardware, it will often attempt
> boot repair by booting a copy of WinPE from a ramdisk. Last I knew, the
> default boot repair does not fix iSCSI boot disks. The boot to WinPE is
> done by iSCSI BIOS (or I supposed the UEFI equivalent, or something like
> gPXE/iPXE chain loading via PXE) loading of the WinPE ramdisk. Once WinPE
> is running, you can do device detection, install of the correct NIC
> drivers, and then you will need to clone that driver install info into the
> real boot disk, which is not a documented procedure. If this all worked
> correctly, when you reboot again, the real OS will have the correct NIC
> drivers loaded.
>
> I believe I know the patch you’re talking about, and believe that only
> works if it’s the same hardware kind in the same slot. When by default
> they used PCIe serial numbered based PnP instance naming, it became a
> problem when moving images between identical servers or when hardware had
> to be replaced due to failures. The need for serial number based instance
> ids was partially due to servers with dynamically created PCIe devices,
> as a device might dynamically be added that changed the PCIe BDF of a boot
> device, but it’s serial number was stable.
>
> A number of people have looked into this some years ago there was a
> discussion thread on a gPXE (now iPXE) forum.
>
> The easy solution is boot a thin client that talks via remote desktop to a
> server running a Windows 7 VM.
>
> Jan
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: xxxxx@lists.osr.com [mailto:
> xxxxx@lists.osr.com] On Behalf Of xxxxx@hotmail.com
> Sent: Tuesday, July 23, 2013 1:49 AM
> To: Windows System Software Devs Interest List
> Subject: [ntdev] How to boot windows 7 over iscsi with different hardware
>
> Hi,
>
> As the title suggests, I’m looking for something that will help me to
> boot windows7 over iscsi with different NIC.
>
> Here’s the current situation,
>
> I’ve iscsi set-up on ubuntu server edition with dhcp server up and running
> on it. All the settings related with the dhcp configuration have been taken
> care of (You can be sure of this).
>
> Windows 7 has been installed on the iscsi disk thr’ some particular
> machine (it’s basically a thin-client, let’s say x1). It has drivers
> corresponding to NIC of this machine. So this way I have a windows7 iscsi
> image and I can diskless boot from this image from the machine (x1) as many
> times as I want to without any problem and everything works fine.
>
> Problem is when I try to boot from some completely different machine (say,
> thin-client, x2-with different NIC than x1), the booting process halts at
> “Starting Windows” windows logo.
>
> The microsft hotfix works when ALL NIC going to be used to boot from iSCSI
> are present in computer. How to add NIC when it?s different brand (the one
> which was not present during iSCSI installation)?
>
> You can conisder the scenario where 2nd machine is just a clone of 1st
> machine. And while booting from 2nd machine I’m just changing the NIC thr’
> hypervisor settings. Do I need to write some driver which will enable me
> achieve this? If yes, what its functionality should be? Have there been any
> previous successful attempts at this? (As per my reasearch, there haven’t
> been any, not counting the commercial ones.)
>
> This question may seem like a bit out of place for NTDEV but after several
> weeks of unsuccessful research & tryouts I thought this would be the best
> place to get further info.
>
>
>
> —
> NTDEV is sponsored by OSR
>
> Visit the list at: http://www.osronline.com/showlists.cfm?list=ntdev
>
> OSR is HIRING!! See http://www.osr.com/careers
>
> For our schedule of WDF, WDM, debugging and other seminars visit:
> http://www.osr.com/seminars
>
> To unsubscribe, visit the List Server section of OSR Online at
> http://www.osronline.com/page.cfm?name=ListServer
>
> —
> NTDEV is sponsored by OSR
>
> Visit the list at: http://www.osronline.com/showlists.cfm?list=ntdev
>
> OSR is HIRING!! See http://www.osr.com/careers
>
> For our schedule of WDF, WDM, debugging and other seminars visit:
> http://www.osr.com/seminars
>
> To unsubscribe, visit the List Server section of OSR Online at
> http://www.osronline.com/page.cfm?name=ListServer
>

–

- ab

Jan_Bottorff · July 23, 2013, 2:00pm

I’m pretty sure sysprep does not help with iSCSI booting, only storage devices that can be installed via the critical device database. The issue is you need to run the user mode network class installer to make a NIC usable.

Jan

From: xxxxx@lists.osr.com [mailto:xxxxx@lists.osr.com] On Behalf Of A B
Sent: Tuesday, July 23, 2013 6:01 AM
To: Windows System Software Devs Interest List
Subject: Re: [ntdev] How to boot windows 7 over iscsi with different hardware

hi Jan,

wont running sysprep work? Assuming that at shutdown time the OP triggered sysprep and shutdown the OS, then booted off of it sysprep should trigger a hardware detection and installation.

Alternatively, in WinPE if the OP makes the sysprep related changes, and reboots the OS it should also trigger the same functionality.

I am not sure though if sysprep works over iSCSI but it should…

OSR_Community_User · July 24, 2013, 3:05am

There are quite a few solutions in the market who have managed to do exactly this. (I don’t know if it’s a good practice, talking about reverse engineering of a commercial product but since the scope of the subject is so limited, I’ve no choice.) One of the products is CCBoot (http://www.ccboot.com/boot-windows-7.htm) I’ve been trying to figure out how this solution works. They have 2 drivers, one UpperFilter NDIS driver & the other belonging to the ‘system’ class along with the new NIC driver. And I’ve not been able to figure out what is the functionality of these 2 drivers. Do you have any idea so as to what they might be doing?
I’ll look into WinPE thing. I wasn’t aware of this method. Could you provide me with the link that suggests how to clone that driver install info into the real boot disk, since its not a documented procedure.
So does the entire problem boils down to being able to install NIC drivers in the absence of corresponding device? Based on this idea I tried to install NIC drivers using DriverPackagePreinstall but had no luck. Is there any tool/utility that you are know of which will help me to accomplish exactly this?

Enigma2e · July 24, 2013, 5:38pm

I developed for my computer science labs, a freebsd-based iscsi netboot system that would “deploy” one image to a whole host of heterogenous hardware efficiently. I too ran into this problem. I would install all needed NIC drivers into driver store before “capturing” the boot image. When it would boot on a client, it would bsod inaccessible boot device because when the nic driver was instantiated for the iscsi storage stack, it included a wfp filter that is not compatible with boot environment preventing nic stack frm loading.

This was a huge barrier and my way around it was to deploy a customized windows setup with autounattend.xml and an install.wim made from my captured image. When windows setup runs it sees that its on iscsi and removes that filter from the stack as well as marking nic boot-time.

Email me off list if you would like details of my implemetation.

Sent from my Windows Mobile? phone.

-----Original Message-----
From: xxxxx@hotmail.com
Sent: Tuesday, July 23, 2013 1:48 AM
To: Windows System Software Devs Interest List
Subject: [ntdev] How to boot windows 7 over iscsi with different hardware

Hi,

As the title suggests, I’m looking for something that will help me to boot windows7 over iscsi with different NIC.

Here’s the current situation,

I’ve iscsi set-up on ubuntu server edition with dhcp server up and running on it. All the settings related with the dhcp configuration have been taken care of (You can be sure of this).

Windows 7 has been installed on the iscsi disk thr’ some particular machine (it’s basically a thin-client, let’s say x1). It has drivers corresponding to NIC of this machine. So this way I have a windows7 iscsi image and I can diskless boot from this image from the machine (x1) as many times as I want to without any problem and everything works fine.

Problem is when I try to boot from some completely different machine (say, thin-client, x2-with different NIC than x1), the booting process halts at “Starting Windows” windows logo.

The microsft hotfix works when ALL NIC going to be used to boot from iSCSI are present in computer. How to add NIC when it?s different brand (the one which was not present during iSCSI installation)?

You can conisder the scenario where 2nd machine is just a clone of 1st machine. And while booting from 2nd machine I’m just changing the NIC thr’ hypervisor settings. Do I need to write some driver which will enable me achieve this? If yes, what its functionality should be? Have there been any previous successful attempts at this? (As per my reasearch, there haven’t been any, not counting the commercial ones.)

This question may seem like a bit out of place for NTDEV but after several weeks of unsuccessful research & tryouts I thought this would be the best place to get further info.

—
NTDEV is sponsored by OSR

Visit the list at: http://www.osronline.com/showlists.cfm?list=ntdev

OSR is HIRING!! See http://www.osr.com/careers

For our schedule of WDF, WDM, debugging and other seminars visit:
http://www.osr.com/seminars

To unsubscribe, visit the List Server section of OSR Online at http://www.osronline.com/page.cfm?name=ListServer

OSR_Community_User · August 19, 2013, 10:08am

It’s been a while since the time I posted here, but whatever I was trying did not pan out.
To tackle this here’s what I’m thinking,
Cause of failure:
Booting of windows7 over the network with different NIC fails since the driver of this new NIC is not present in the system.
So even if the PnP manager enumerates newly attached NIC, it’s not able to load its driver since it was never installed to start with.
In order to address this, I’m thinking of writing a driver (at this point I think it should be a bus filter driver) which will continuosly
listen on the event of new device discovery and as soon as it figures out that new NIC has been attached then it will install its driver.

Doubts(loads of them):

Is it really necessary to write bus filter driver in this case? Or the exact same functinality could be achieved without writing bus filter driver?
How do we install a driver of NIC from another a driver i.e. bus filter driver in this case? Usually this task is achived by user mode app in conjunction with the PnP.
Other threads from the osronline say that the bus filter driver should be written using WDM only. Can you point me to any good code sample of bus filter driver?

Please correct me if I’m wrong.

Thanks

Maxim_S_Shatskih · August 19, 2013, 10:24am

> So even if the PnP manager enumerates newly attached NIC, it’s not able to load its driver since it

was never installed to start with.
In order to address this, I’m thinking of writing a driver

The very idea of having 2 drivers for a NIC - one this “listener”, another the real one - looks like some fantastic nonsense for me.

PnP itself is this “listener” driver, which invokes the driver installation procedure when a new NIC is found.

Just preinstall the NIC driver to the system using the standard “devcon dp_add”.

–
Maxim S. Shatskih
Microsoft MVP on File System And Storage
xxxxx@storagecraft.com
http://www.storagecraft.com

OSR_Community_User · August 19, 2013, 10:54am

“PnP itself is this “listener” driver, which invokes the driver installation
procedure when a new NIC is found.”

As per this theory then driver for new NIC should get installed, right? I’ve placed them in the driver store yet they don’t get installed. And I’ve tried using “devcon dp_add” long back, it does not work. You receive the same BSOD as mentioned here,
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/976042

Doron_Holan · August 19, 2013, 11:18am

You can’t install a driver from another driver. The device has to be present for the package to be installed, so install the Nic before reboot

d

Bent from my phone

From: xxxxx@hotmail.com mailto:xxxxx
Sent: ?8/?19/?2013 7:54 AM
To: Windows System Software Devs Interest Listmailto:xxxxx
Subject: RE:[ntdev] How to boot windows 7 over iscsi with different hardware

“PnP itself is this “listener” driver, which invokes the driver installation
procedure when a new NIC is found.”

As per this theory then driver for new NIC should get installed, right? I’ve placed them in the driver store yet they don’t get installed. And I’ve tried using “devcon dp_add” long back, it does not work. You receive the same BSOD as mentioned here,
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/976042

—
NTDEV is sponsored by OSR

Visit the list at: http://www.osronline.com/showlists.cfm?list=ntdev

OSR is HIRING!! See http://www.osr.com/careers

For our schedule of WDF, WDM, debugging and other seminars visit:
http://www.osr.com/seminars

To unsubscribe, visit the List Server section of OSR Online at http://www.osronline.com/page.cfm?name=ListServer</mailto:xxxxx></mailto:xxxxx>

Maxim_S_Shatskih · August 19, 2013, 11:34am

So, you’re booting from the network?

Then please tell us how the additional driver can help in this case.

The bootloader will use the card’s BIOS (or EFI driver) to access the LUN. Yes, it will allow Windows kernel and lots of other stuff, like tcpip.sys, to be loaded.

But then, when your additional driver will get control, there will be no ways (except probably some “generic EFI driver”, which is absent on non-EFI systems) to access the LUN to load your NIC driver.

So, the solutions are:

rely on some “generic EFI” way (which ends in the card’s BIOS chip) to access the boot LUN. Does not work on non-EFI system.
pre-patch the existing OS image to add the NIC adapter object there. For this, you need not only a driver in the driver store, but also a PnP devnode for a NIC and NDIS registration entries. Probably CriticalDeviceDatabase can help. Probably not.
CriticalDeviceDatabase will surely work for storage controllers. So, if you can write a driver for your NIC which will expose it as storage controller (iSCSI-based), then this will be much simpler.

Also search the list archives, the problem was discussed here in some months.

–
Maxim S. Shatskih
Microsoft MVP on File System And Storage
xxxxx@storagecraft.com
http://www.storagecraft.com

wrote in message news:xxxxx@ntdev…
> “PnP itself is this “listener” driver, which invokes the driver installation
> procedure when a new NIC is found.”
>
> As per this theory then driver for new NIC should get installed, right? I’ve placed them in the driver store yet they don’t get installed. And I’ve tried using “devcon dp_add” long back, it does not work. You receive the same BSOD as mentioned here,
> http://support.microsoft.com/kb/976042
>

OSR_Community_User · August 29, 2013, 3:33am

The problem described here is somewhat similar,
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ntdebugging/archive/2010/03/25/critical-device-database-tip.aspx

which is of Stop 0x7B (Inaccessible_Boot_Device).

The important thing to note is the following text from the same link,
“The Instance ID is used to look up the particulars such as driver name and class in the HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\ENUM key in the registry. What happened here is the lookup failed and the system thought it was a new device. Since based on the device class this device was needed for boot, a Stop 0x7B occurred.”

So when I boot from another NIC, the Instance ID of the NIC that is used for the look-up is not present in the registry under HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\ENUM. So if I’m able to create this key under Enum thr’ may be bus filter driver (not sure about this) on the discovery of NIC and before this look-up operation happens, do you think it may just go ahead on its way to boot?

Thanks.

Doron_Holan · August 29, 2013, 1:12pm

To be clear, drivers do not write out values under HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\ENUM. The enum key is private to the os

d

Bent from my phone

From: xxxxx@hotmail.com mailto:xxxxx
Sent: ?8/?29/?2013 12:33 AM
To: Windows System Software Devs Interest Listmailto:xxxxx
Subject: RE:[ntdev] How to boot windows 7 over iscsi with different hardware

The problem described here is somewhat similar,
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ntdebugging/archive/2010/03/25/critical-device-database-tip.aspx

which is of Stop 0x7B (Inaccessible_Boot_Device).

The important thing to note is the following text from the same link,
“The Instance ID is used to look up the particulars such as driver name and class in the HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\ENUM key in the registry. What happened here is the lookup failed and the system thought it was a new device. Since based on the device class this device was needed for boot, a Stop 0x7B occurred.”

So when I boot from another NIC, the Instance ID of the NIC that is used for the look-up is not present in the registry under HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\ENUM. So if I’m able to create this key under Enum thr’ may be bus filter driver (not sure about this) on the discovery of NIC and before this look-up operation happens, do you think it may just go ahead on its way to boot?

Thanks.

—
NTDEV is sponsored by OSR

Visit the list at: http://www.osronline.com/showlists.cfm?list=ntdev

OSR is HIRING!! See http://www.osr.com/careers

For our schedule of WDF, WDM, debugging and other seminars visit:
http://www.osr.com/seminars

To unsubscribe, visit the List Server section of OSR Online at http://www.osronline.com/page.cfm?name=ListServer</mailto:xxxxx></mailto:xxxxx>

OSR_Community_User · August 30, 2013, 5:43am

okay, So could adding the entry inside the CDDB help, given the .INF file of 2nd NIC?
Do you any tool/utility which allows to add entry in CDDB? I know handling CDDB or having dependecy on CDDB isn’t great since apparently it isn’t there in Win 8 but still would like to know as the problem is specific to win7 in my case.

Thanks.

OSR_Community_User · September 1, 2013, 11:43am

I’ve gone thr’ following links while searching for the solution:
http://www.etherboot.org/wiki/appnotes/port_winnt_sanboot

I wonder if anybody has ever successfully managed to create sort of universal image using the section “Installing Target NIC” mentioned in above link. The import-export of .REG file eventually hard codes the Instance-Id for the NIC whereas Instance-Id is something that is generated on the fly. Obviously when iSCSI booted, it looks up the Instance-Id (which will be different almost at all times than the one present in the registry) for the new NIC under “Enum” and it won’t be able to locate one and hence the problem persists.

Also,
http://reboot.pro/topic/11182-how-to-use-the-registry-to-install-drivers-directly/
suggests that this problem might go away by adding reg entry for this new NIC inside “Critical Device Database”. However doing some research on net suggests that it does not hold true when it comes to NIC.

This discussion here https://www.osronline.com/showthread.cfm?link=179746 at osronline suggests that one should create phantom devnode in advance. My doubts are,

why there is a need to create such devnode in advance? Isn’t it supposed to be created on the fly by PnP manager i.e. on the detection of the device. I guess entire device tree is build on this principal.
How to create this phantom node and at the same take care of network bindings?
Is CDDB entry necessary?

Thanks.

Alex_Grig · September 1, 2013, 2:50pm

NIC installation and creation of NIC-specific registry is done by usermode code. It can’t be done during boot.

But the real question is: Why don’t you use Windows Deployment Server instead of the custom freebsd solution, to deploy the OS?

Jan_Bottorff · September 1, 2013, 4:09pm

My guess is the OP doesn’t want to install the OS, they want an iSCSI image that can be dynamically booted on some random system. You might have some sort of preboot login PXE loaded, which then communicates with the iSCSI/DHCP server to boot YOUR image. There also are some who believe this is useful on servers, sort of like VMs that boot on a variety of physical systems, like say for fail-over. For desktops, it’s just way easier to boot a thin client and connect to a desktop running as a VM. This also has the huge advantage I can signoff my thin client here, and sign in over there and my desktop is still running exactly like I left it. Of course a remote VM will not to have as good graphics performance.

Jan

-----Original Message-----
From: xxxxx@lists.osr.com [mailto:xxxxx@lists.osr.com] On Behalf Of xxxxx@broadcom.com
Sent: Sunday, September 01, 2013 11:50 AM
To: Windows System Software Devs Interest List
Subject: RE:[ntdev] How to boot windows 7 over iscsi with different hardware

NIC installation and creation of NIC-specific registry is done by usermode code. It can’t be done during boot.

But the real question is: Why don’t you use Windows Deployment Server instead of the custom freebsd solution, to deploy the OS?

NTDEV is sponsored by OSR

Visit the list at: http://www.osronline.com/showlists.cfm?list=ntdev

OSR is HIRING!! See http://www.osr.com/careers

For our schedule of WDF, WDM, debugging and other seminars visit:
http://www.osr.com/seminars

To unsubscribe, visit the List Server section of OSR Online at http://www.osronline.com/page.cfm?name=ListServer

OSR_Community_User · September 2, 2013, 5:46am

Yes Jan, you got it right.
The solution you suggested in your post seems interesting,

Your best bet might be to write a WinPE repair script/program. When the OS can’t
boot after migrating to different hardware, it will often attempt boot repair by
booting a copy of WinPE from a ramdisk. Last I knew, the default boot repair
does not fix iSCSI boot disks. The boot to WinPE is done by iSCSI BIOS (or I
supposed the UEFI equivalent, or something like gPXE/iPXE chain loading via PXE)
loading of the WinPE ramdisk. Once WinPE is running, you can do device
detection, install of the correct NIC drivers, and then you will need to clone
that driver install info into the real boot disk, which is not a documented
procedure. If this all worked correctly, when you reboot again, the real OS will
have the correct NIC drivers loaded.

I went into “repair windows” option and it detected new NIC and also allowed me to install them. But how do I reflect those changes into real iscsi boot disk? Are you aware of any method which will help me to achieve this.

Thanks.

Maxim_S_Shatskih · September 2, 2013, 7:09am

>This also has the huge advantage I can signoff my thin client here, and sign in over there and my

desktop is still running exactly like I left it

Oh yes, this is a VERY major advantage of terminal-style stuff, so for now I use it for personal stuff too

–
Maxim S. Shatskih
Microsoft MVP on File System And Storage
xxxxx@storagecraft.com
http://www.storagecraft.com