Newer UEFI BIOSes should use ipxe.efi, not undionly.kpxe about lanparty HOT 2 CLOSED

Unfortunately, the UEFI version of iPXE cannot load a disk image larger than 4GB (initrd win10.iso throws "Not enough space"), and cannot chainload the memdisk utility since it is not UEFI. So the whole approach to booting the Windows installer doesn't work.

Possible alternatives:

• I actually managed to get a regular Windows 10 installer USB stick to see the iSCSI drive as a boot target, when I set up my machine to first try booting iPXE and then fall back to USB. iPXE seems to have left the appropriate iBFT in memory in this case. So the process might be much simpler! However, I hit a BSOD in the installer shortly after it began copying files. Same as this thread describes: https://forum.ipxe.org/showthread.php?tid=23709 This seems like an installer bug. Going to try an older version...
• Another option to investigate is "wimboot": https://ipxe.org/howto/winpe

from lanparty.

I believe the Windows installer BSOD was likely a bad network driver. The Windows 11 installer got further, managing to copy files to disk and reboot. But, it BSODed when trying to boot into the full OS, claiming INACCESSIBLE_BOOT_DEVICE. This could ALSO be due to a bad network driver, though it's not clear.

Perhaps I could have solved these issues by creating a custom boot image with the correct drivers. However, that seemed like a lot of work, using arcane tools.

Instead, I tried the approach of installing to a real disk, updating all drivers, and then taking the disk image and serving it over iSCSI. To my utter shock, this just worked. Well OK, then. I guess that's the process, then.

from lanparty.