[syslinux] PXE looping on localboot

[Andrew Bobulsky]

Hello Lee,

On Thu, May 24, 2012 at 12:01 PM, Lee Eric <openlinuxsource at gmail.com> wrote:
> Okay guys, 2 suggestions:
>
> 1. Change your NBP to the latest version.
> 2. Using chain.c32 as chainloader. It's quite stable as I tried in
> many different servers.

Regarding chain.c32, is there a consensus here that using it against
hd0 (or hd1, hd2, hdN) is the most robust way to move from PXELINUX to
a local disk?  I remember that doing so was always a little bit
difficult when working with gPXE, and PXELINUX's "localboot" directive
was always much more reliable on the Dell Optiplex systems I was
working with at the time (of course, iPXE has since worked around that
problem by allowing "sanboot" to apply to local disks).

Back to the point of my question though, I do recall some instances
where PXELINUX's localboot didn't quite work correctly
(troubleshooting a server or something by PXE booting is always a fun
pastime :D), so, do you recommend using chain.c32 only as a workaround
to this and similar problems, or actually as a best practice for
situations where PXELINUX is part of a standard boot process?

Cheers,
Andrew Bobulsky

> On Thu, May 24, 2012 at 11:39 PM, Vanush Misha <misha at cs.nuim.ie> wrote:
>> On Thu, 24 May 2012 16:22:10 +0200 Pascal Legrand
>> <Pascal.Legrand at univ-orleans.fr> wrote:
>>
>>> > I have seen posts about this problem, but have had trouble finding
>>> > how/if it was resolved. I am trying to upgrade from syslinux-3.11
>>> > to syslinux-3.86 on RHEL5.
>>> >
>>> > On 3.86, when it performs a local boot from hard disk, it just
>>> > keeps looping back into PXE boot again instead of booting from the
>>> > hard disk. It will perform a system install just fine, but when it
>>> > switches to localboot after the install, it keeps looping through
>>> > PXE boot.
>>> >
>>> > The file in pxelinux.cfg looks like this:
>>> > #boot
>>> > DEFAULT xCAT
>>> > LABEL xCAT
>>> > LOCALBOOT 0
>>> >
>>> > This works just fine in 3.11. I also noticed that in 3.86, there's
>>> > a message on the console about "!PXE entry point not found" which I
>>> > don't see in 3.11. The hardware involved is IBM BladeCenter HS21,
>>> > with onboard Broadcom gigabit ethernet.
>>> >
>>> > Is there a solution for this problem?
>>> >
>>> > Mike Waldron
>>> >
>>> > _________________________________________
>>>
>>> here is mine :
>>> #Boot local
>>>         LABEL BootNormal
>>>         MENU LABEL Boot local
>>>         MENU DEFAULT
>>>         COM32 chain.c32
>>>         APPEND hd0
>>>
>>> not sure it's the solution for your problem
>>>
>>
>> This worked for me.
>>
>> --
>> Vanush "Misha" Paturyan
>> Senior Technical Officer
>> Room 1.37
>> Computer Science Department
>> NUI Maynooth
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