On Mon, Jul 12, 2010 at 11:52 AM, Nathan Mitchell <nmitc...@mcs.anl.gov> wrote: > All, > Over the last few weeks we have been experimenting with gpxe and the > ability to perform a local boot, ie falling back to the bios and letting it > decide what the next step is. > The documentation from the gpxe command line > reference, http://www.etherboot.org/wiki/commandline, says the following: > > exit Exits gPXE, and passes boot control back to the BIOS, which > generally attempts to boot the system using the next available boot method. > > In my mind, this is exactly what a local boot should be. In our case, we > are using the undionly.kpxe binary over pxe and we would like to, under > certain circumstances, skip network booting and > boot from a local disk. However, when the exit command is given, gpxe > seems to exit and then a message appears that reads to the effect of: > > Please insert boot media and press a key. > This is a slight paraphrasing, but the effect is clear - the system hangs > until someone physically presses a key. At that point the boot process > proceeds to the hard disk where we have grub installed. > My question is this: Is this message a result of gpxe or is it from the > bios? Obviously the next boot device is bootable, or grub wouldn't load, so > why does it need to ask me to continue so explicitly? Is there a > way to force the boot process to continue without needing human > interaction? For a remote network boot scheme, it is just impossible to > require manual intervention in the process, especially if the intervention > requires physical access to the machine.
gPXE does the best it can given the limitations of the BIOS. That message is produced by your BIOS; it's the modern manifestation of the old "Non-system disk or disk error". I'm not sure if there are ways around it; perhaps someone else on this list can offer better advice? -- Josh > -- Nathan > _______________________________________________ > gPXE mailing list > gPXE@etherboot.org > http://etherboot.org/mailman/listinfo/gpxe > > _______________________________________________ gPXE mailing list gPXE@etherboot.org http://etherboot.org/mailman/listinfo/gpxe
