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June 29th, 2022 02:00
Why PXE boot jumps to boot from local disk?
So I've configured the UEFI to boot PXE, and I can see that it boots "succesfully":
Booting from PXE Device 1: Integrated NIC 1Port 1 Partition 1
Start PXE over IPV4.
Station IP address is blaah
Server IP address is foobar
NBP filename is bootx64.efi
NBP filesize is 1341560 Bytes
Downloading NBP file...
NBP file downloaded succesfully.
Fetching Netboot Image
And at this point the screen clears and the server says next:
Booting local disk...
error: no such device /efi/boot/bootx64.efi
Why does it jump to booting from local disk and not continue with PXE?
That server HAS booted from PXE before, but we changed the role of it and manually installed ESXi on the BOSS drives. (240GB SSD). Which BTW caused me hours to figure out. We have 2 RAID controllers...the BOSS thing and the other internal one H750 if I recall. I disabled the H750 from the boot sequence and ONLY, I stress ONLY(!!!), had PXE boot in there, and still it kept finding ESXi somehow. It looks to me like I can select PXE and H750 to be in the boot sequence, and if those fail somehow, it will automatically jump to the BOSS boot. The only way to prevent ESXi booting, was to wipe the BOSS drives clean. Well....now it complains it can't find the boot files, but still doesn't boot PXE.
What should I do?
DELL-Charles R
Moderator
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4.4K Posts
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June 29th, 2022 08:00
Hello tosaraja,
What is the server model?
To start with I can provide these resources for you:
Configuring server boot options on 14th generation Dell EMC PowerEdge servers
Page 14 - Enable PXE boot, set boot sequence, and then apply job by rebooting the server
https://dell.to/3Nws0am
Boot Mode Considerations: BIOS vs. UEFI
https://dell.to/3OOM0pM
Starting page 9 Configuration Settings for UEFI Boot Mode
Figure 3 (page 11) UEFI Boot Order Configuration
See the Boot Options Enable/Disable options. Deselect the ones you do not want
Also try removing the BOSS card and test if you can successfully boot PXE
tosaraja
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34 Posts
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June 29th, 2022 22:00
I found the problem finally. We PXE boot into MAAS, and MAAS had the server already in its inventory since months back. We never removed it from there. So my guess is that the boot process continues straight forward to "well you have already installed the OS according to my knowledge, so let's proceed to booting from it", and that's why it always jumped to the OS... because MAAS told it to do so.
I just deleted the server from MAAS and a new install was performed via PXE.
Gee...a day well spent hitting my head against a wall in BIOS settings...