[richard]

hi there,
as i know in legacy BIOS, pxelinux.0 would load bootmgr.exe and BCD, and then bootmgr.exe read BCD so that we can select different OS to install.
But how to do similar work in UEFI mode? i tried bootx64.efi, but it seems would not auto load bootmgr.efi and BCD as legacy BIOS, anybody could help? thanks in advance!

[Tripredacus]

AFAIK, there are no PXE Boot ROMs that support a UEFI boot action. You can only do a UEFI boot from HDD, USB (sometimes) or ODD.

[richard]

i don't think so. i have set up a RHEL 6.1 server and config UEFI PXE boot, now my client machine could boot from a NIC which support UEFI PXE. My question is how to load windows set up menu like legacy BIOS to load BCD.

[Tripredacus]

Even Server 2008 R2 is capable of accepting a UEFI PXE boot, but no hardware supports it. What hardware are you using that has a UEFI Boot Rom on it? I'd like to know because the lack of such hardware is holding back a couple of my projects.

[richard]

i used Intel CT Desktop NIC, but this NIC only support PXE by default, you need to flash its rom to support EFI + PXE using bootutil. you can find more info in intel's website

[Tripredacus]

I have that NIC and we did that testing already. Yes it enables the UEFI boot but it still reports an arch of 6 (EFI IA32) which isn't the correct value to for a true UEFI PXE boot. For example, during this testing, I had built a boot image capable of installing Windows to a GPT Disc. This same boot image works as expected from a UEFI boot CD. But even with using both the flashed CT (we also did the GT card also) it still actually did a BIOS based PXE boot. The consequence was that the OS installed properly but a BIOS booted WinPE cannot write the boot-sector to a UEFI enabled disk. We had gone through Quad for this issue as well and Intel had told us they did not currently have any product available that was capable of the proper UEFI PXE boot for this purpose, and to expect it in the next wave (7 series) products.

However, during our testing, we ended up getting the "normal" BIOS type response from the PXE server. So our regular WDS boot menu worked as normal. I am not sure if we tried booting to the Linux server to see if it had worked or not.

I have a topic in the Hardware Hangout when i was working on that project you can check out.

[patters]

VMware ESXi 5.0 offers EFI firmware support, including PXE. I've been looking at this just recently because I want to make sure all servers built from now on are legacy free. The EFI firmware correctly IDs itself from what I can see, because I can see from the WDS events that it does successfully TFTP download the file boot\x64\Bootmgfw.efi
However, it crashes and powers off the VM when it is executed, even though I'm on the latest ESXi (5.0U1). I followed the tips here:
http://support.micro....com/kb/2012858

I have been able to work around this for now using a WinPE ISO image with EFI support, while VMware support look into the issue for me. To do this I updated my unified Windows PE build script to support EFI. This single batch script will build x86 and/or x64 versions, will ingest drivers, supports wifi, builds ISOs, and will automatically freshen the WDS boot images when complete. It does not use any third party tools - only Microsoft's WAIK:
http://pcloadletter....g-wifi-support/

This post has been edited by patters: 10 April 2012 - 05:41 PM

[Tripredacus]

I am reading that WinPE 4.0 has better EFI support than 3.0... also that hardware with UEFI 2.3.1 should have the PXE support, but figuring out what spec boards use for UEFI is pretty difficult.