Hi Andrey,
A packet capture of all traffic to and from the client machine during
the booting process would likely show the cause of the problem.
This is usually done with WireShark or tcpdump.
A packet capture would reveal what packets the client machine received
and transmitted, and when.
You problems could also be caused by other factors, such as incorrect
values being passed via DHCP (incorrect DNS servers or other network
parameters), bad cabling, bad switch ports, bad routing, and a variety
of other causes.
Here is a useful tool for doing packet captures:
http://www.newegg.com/product/product.aspx?Item=N82E16833124258
The Cisco SLM2008 8 port gigabit switch has a feature called "port
mirroring", which will silently copy the traffic from one port to
another port. This way you can run WireShark or tcpdump on a laptop or
other computer and capture _all_ network traffic to and from your
client. There are other ways to do it, but I thought I would mention
this one, since it can be very helpful.
Once you have a packet capture there are a number of people on this list
who can help you analyze it to understand what might be going wrong.
The good news is that most people don't seem to have these issues, so it
is probably something that can be debugged fairly easily by changing one
variable at a time and testing.
It's time to dive beneath the surface of the blinking lights and
understand the conversation happening on the wire a little better.
I hope this helps get you started. I'm sure some other folks will chime
in to give suggestions on how to debug this problem.
Please let us know how things go.
/ Marty /
P.S. Debugging this problem would make a good appnote (
http://etherboot.org/wiki/appnotes ), so please consider keeping notes
as we solve the problem together, and others may benefit from the
exercise. )
On 6/27/10 5:36 AM, Andrey Kuzmin wrote:
> I've finally installed Windows 7 x64 to iSCSI target using Win 7 AIK.
> Setup went fine except very long time period between Starting
> Windows and any noticeable activitity during 2 installation reboots.
> Those periods took about 10-20 minutes of "doing nothing".
>
> Now my fresh installation have the similar issue with booting. What I
> see is:
>
> 1) After gPXE stage I see black screen for 50 seconds till Starting
> Windows appear (that's OK)
> 2) After Start Windows message till windows logo appears there is 5-6
> minutes period of "inactivity" (not OK)
> 3) After this windows loads and works fine
>
> I've also tried booting in Safe mode - that is terrible :) Driver
> loading lines appear one by one with half minute intervals. The whole
> safe mode booting process takes about 20 minutes.
>
> Could you suggest how to improve booting performace? I'll play
> with another configurations too and with x86 to get more experience,
> but appreciate any help.
>
> My configuration:
>
> Gygabyte G41ME-S2L
> Intel Pro 1000 CT (8086:10d3)
> gPXE 1.0.1-rc1
> iscsitarget on Ubuntu 10.04 over gigabit network
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