Marcin Kosieradzki wrote:
On the machine with an old revision S5000PSL (with builtin VGA) (the
one I was describing in previous email): if I didn't
press ctrl+B there was a "Press F2 to enter SETUP" message displayed and
sometimes after pressing F2 it was changing into "Entering SETUP", but
nothing happened.
There are two Control-B prompts from gPXE, one during POST and another
when it's gPXE's turn to boot. In general, it's best to avoid the
POST-time prompt, since gPXE will get going before POST has completed,
and we've seen scenarios where the memory map is incomplete. Also,
other devices might not have initialized, such as a RAID controller
providing an INT 0x13 hook for HDD access.
On the machine with a newer revision S5000PSL (with builtin VGA),
after not pressing ctrl+B in gpxe there was
initialization message of second chipset on my NC380T (which I didn't
turn off) displayed,
something like "Press F1 to skip iSCSI". And then "Press F2 to enter
SETUP"....
It's possible to run out of option ROM space by having too many option
ROMs. Removing cards or possibly disabling them in BIOS setup might help.
On the third machine with an old recision S5000VSA (with PCI VGA card
and builtin VGA card disabled):
If I pressed ctrl+B machine was immediately rebooted.
If I didn't there was "press F2 to enter setup" and machine was
rebooted after few seconds.
I've seen a gPXE ROM recently rebooting a particular model I have here,
much as you've described. I'll try to find the time to look into it.
I'm planning to buy Intel PRO/1000 ET NIC, put it in lower number
PCI-e port, boot OS from iSCSI, disable mba on
both chipsets on NC380T and then continue to solve first issue, but
this time probably running gPXE from USB stick.
Note that recently I tried to SAN-boot an HP ProLiant ML370 G5 computer,
but the Windows had a Blue Screen of Death. Quite familiar with
SAN-booting, this suggests to me that the Windows NIC drivers might not
be capable of completing the SAN-boot; perhaps they rely on user-land
components or perhaps there's a filter driver that needs to be found and
enabled at boot-time. I don't know if this relates to your situation at
all, but wanted to share.
Good luck!
- Shao Miller
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