PXE Boot Image from an ISO

[forhad12]

Thanks Darragh. I am still having problems with this. i think my image file is not right. I am using the latest version 8.1.100.2677 (11 Jun 2008). If you can please upload your script that will be awesome.

Thanks

[shocko]

The script forhad12 as requested. Works with build 8.1.100.2677 of the HP insight Diagnostics Offline CD. Make sure your defualt config file includes:

label HPIOD
kernel vmlinuzname
append initrd=$initrdname rw root=/dev/ram0 ramdisk_size=200000 init=/sos quiet ide=nodma loglevel=2 pci=nommconf BOOT_IMAGE=vmlinuzname


where vmlinuzname/$initrdname is the name of the kernel/ramdisk file generated by the script!!!

Send me the entire output of the script when it runs if things still dont work!

:)

[shocko]

Script attachment would have been nice! my bad!
here ya go!

[Adam Burden]

Has anybody managed to edit the Firmware iso ( adding the hpsum express_install option ) and recreated the iso successfully ?

When I recreate the iso it's not bootable ! or with a little hacking around I'm getting "isolinux: Image checksum error, sorry..." on boot.

"mkisofs -iso-level 3 -r -no-emul-boot -b system/isolinux.bin -c system/boot.cat -o /files/FW830-auto.iso /files/FW830-auto/"

The iso is getting mounted via the ilo.

[forhad12]

Thank you so much Darragh O'Shaughnessy. it works perfectly now.

[CamScott]

Hi ElectroPhil,

Yep, they added another file called detectmedia.sh into the /root/compaq/ directory of the initrd.img file, to keep everyone on their toes and to break my script :(.

I've attached my updated script for the latest (at this time) version of the FW CD, 8.30, which modifies detectmedia.sh much the same way as supermount.sh.

As before, plonk it in the same directory as the Smartstart 8.30 FW CD .iso and run.

It may work with 8.20, but I haven't tested it.

Let me know if you have any issues.

Cheers,
Cam

[ElectroPhil]

Cam,

The script worked fine, but when trying to pxe boot the img file it stops after some dots and "ready." I've attached the screen capture. Any ideas?


Started at
Wed Feb 4 23:59:23 PST 2009

The Smartstart firmware iso was found.
rsync was found.
mkisofs was found.
sed was found.
mke2fs was found.

Copying the contents of the iso in order to create a trimmed down version.
Removing extra files to reduce the size of the trimmed iso.
Removing the initrd.img and vmlinuz files from the image.
Creating trimmed down iso file.
Creating a large (320MB) initrd.img file.
Making necessary changes to supermount.sh and detectmedia.sh.
Merging the trimmed iso into the new large initrd.img file.

** Finished creating fw830.img and vmlinuz-fw830!
** Please copy these to your tftpboot directory!

Finish at
Thu Feb 5 00:00:51 PST 2009

** Append the following to your default pxelinux configuration file
label fw830
kernel vmlinuz-fw830
append initrd=fw830.img rw root=/dev/ram0 loglevel=3 ramdisk_size=320000 init=/bin/init ide=nodma ide=noraid pnpbios=off media=usb CDVOLUME=HPFWUP830

[CamScott]

Hi ElectroPhil,

How much memory is in the system you are PXE booting (client)? I only ask as there was an advisory sent out for recent versions of Smartstart and units with >= 64G memory.

Could you provide a screencap of an 'ls -al' showing the size of the fw830.img and vmlinuz-fw830 files?

Could you provide a screencap of your PXE configuration file showing the section for this PXE image?

I'm assuming you downloaded the 8.30 iso and as Darragh suggested "... did you use the md5 hash checksum to verify the download was fully intact?"

Cheers,
Cam

[ElectroPhil]

Hi Cam,

This has 128GB of ram.

-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 237417427 Feb 4 23:59 fw830.img
-rw-rw-rw- 1 root root 1397609 Jul 21 2008 vmlinuz-fw830



LABEL fw830
kernel vmlinuz-fw830
append initrd=fw830.img rw root=/dev/ram0 loglevel=3 ramdisk_size=320000 init=/bin/init ide=nodma ide=noraid pnpbios=off media=usb CDVOLUME=HPFWUP830

Yes, i've verified the md5sum.

[CamScott]

Hi ElectroPhil,

It looks like the 128GB will be the problem then. Here is the advisory for units with >= 64GB of memory. http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/Document.jsp?objectID=c01554945&dimid=1085959812&dicid=alr_oct08&jumpid=em_alerts/us/oct08/all/xbu/emailsubid/mrm/mcc/loc/rbu_category_Advisory(Revision/alerts

The advisory suggests adding "mem=4G" to the append line. If that doesn't work you could try with less than 64GB to see if that helps.

Cheers,
Cam.

[ElectroPhil]

Cam,

Yes, the mem=4G fixed the problem! Thanks for all your help and quick replies. The link you gave was very helpful as well which explains the on/off issues i've had with the CD on some systems with large mem.

Thanks again,
ElectroPhil

[ElectroPhil]

Has anyone figured out how to pxe boot rompaqs? There are flat files included, but i wouldn't know how to use them since I couldn't find much docs on what/how they are used. Any help would greatly be appreciated.

[Peter Capriccio]

PXELINUX has a great utility called "MEMDISK" which enables you to network boot a floppy or hard disk image (see: http://syslinux.zytor.com/wiki/index.php/MEMDISK). As far as I know, most/all ROMPaq boot floppies are *DOS based and are usually delivered in a self-extracting executable (softpaq) that needs to be run under Windows where it writes directly to a floppy drive (hopefully someone knows of a better way to unpack them).

What I've done in the past is to run the softpaq to create the bootable floppy and then make an image file of said floppy (I want to say I used a utility something like "WinImage" under Windows or perhaps "dd" under Linux to create the image file). Once you have the floppy image file, you add your entries to PXELINUX with "MEMDISK" as the kernel and the floppy image file as the initrd.

For example, here is what I use in my PXELINUX "default" file for the ProLiant DL145-series, since it is not supported on the ProLiant Firmware CD:

label ProLiant-DL145G1-ROMPaq
MENU LABEL DL145 G1 Firmware V4.08A (07/21/2005)
kernel memdisk
append initrd=DL145-ROMPaq-V4.08A.IMA

label ProLiant-DL145G1-ROMPaq
MENU LABEL DL145 G1 Firmware V4.08A (07/21/2005) [UNATTENDED]
kernel memdisk
append initrd=DL145-ROMPaq-V4.08A-U.IMA

label ProLiant-DL145-iLO
MENU LABEL ProLiant DL145 iLO Firmware V2.01
kernel memdisk
append initrd=DL145-iLO-V2.01.IMA

label ProLiant-DL145G2-ROMPaq
MENU LABEL DL145 G2 Firmware V2.17B (09/26/2006)
kernel memdisk
append initrd=DL145G2-ROMPaq-V2.17B.IMA

label ProLiant-DL145G2-ROMPaq-Unattended
MENU LABEL DL145 G2 Firmware V2.17B (09/26/2006) [UNATTENDED]
kernel memdisk
append initrd=DL145G2-ROMPaq-V2.17B-U.IMA

label ProLiant-DL145G2-iLO
MENU LABEL ProLiant DL145 G2 iLO Firmware V1.25A
kernel memdisk
append initrd=DL145G2-iLO-V1.25A.IMA

NOTE that the "UNATTENDED" versions of the floppy images contain modified versions of the "CONFIG.SYS" file so that the update runs in unattended mode -- see the attached "unattend.txt" file that was included with one of the ROMPaq diskettes and also the DL145 "Best Practices" document at: http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bc/docs/support/SupportManual/c00772631/c00772631.pdf

[ElectroPhil]

I downloaded a rompaq for a DL585 and other more recent DL series and it looks like the rompaq only supports USB key. Will it work if I make a img of the USB key? I think the img has to be as big as a floppy img?

[Peter Capriccio]

Can you specify which DL server(s) ROMPaq only has USB key support? If we are talking strictly ROMPaq firmware updates (and not adding supplemental files to the ProLiant Firmware Maintenance CD), from what I can tell, the DL585 (G1, G2, and G5) all have floppy images -- the G2/G5 have "Enhanced" ROMPaq softpaqs which contain CDROM, USB, floppy, and flat-file copies of the ROMPaq. The "Enhanced" ROMPaq documentation states in the "Network ROM flashing capabilities" section:

"The second method is done via a Pre-Boot eXecution Environment (PXE) system. A PXE enabled system is a prerequisite to applying this method. The user is required to punch-out a diskette using the diskette.exe file located in the ROMPAQ Diskette folder of the SoftPaq. A single file can be created using a third party application such as WinImage to generate a virtual floppy file (ProLiant.vfd) that can be placed in the appropriate directory on the PXE system. The virtual floppy file can then be accessed via the F-12 button on the client server and used to restore or upgrade its system ROM."

To be on the safe side, you should follow the guidelines in the Readme.txt to obtain your floppy image file, but for those of us mutants that dare to be different, you can try something along these lines:

- in the directory tree that the softpaq creates, there is a folder that contains a bootable ISO image -- for example, in the DL585G2/G5 ROMPaq softpaq, the file is "\SWSetup\SP41748\ROMPaq CD\ROMPAQ.iso" -- within this ISO is a bootable floppy image -- you need a utility that can read the boot section of the ISO -- under Windows, something like IsoBuster or 7-Zip can extract the floppy image -- under Linux, CDFS would seem to be able to do it or a utility like brasero or fuseiso, but I have not tried it (unfortunately a simple loopback mount of the ISO file using filesystem type iso9660 will not "see" the boot tracks)

- once you've extracted the floppy image, copy it to your PXE server -- you could use a PXELINUX menu entry similar to this one (which assumes you've named the floppy image file, "DL585G2G5-ROMPaq-2008.09.27.img"):

label ProLiant-DL585G2-G5-ROMpaq
MENU LABEL ProLiant DL585 G2/G5 (A07) Firmware
kernel memdisk
append initrd=DL585G2G5-ROMPaq-2008.09.27.img

[ElectroPhil]

Maybe i just need the right link to get the software? Here is a link to a DL160 after clicking on a Linux distro. It only has a ROMpaq for usb key.

http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechSupport/SoftwareIndex.jsp?lang=en&cc=us&prodNameId=3580695&prodTypeId=15351&prodSeriesId=3580694&swLang=8&taskId=135&swEnvOID=2025#12212

[Peter Capriccio]

Nope, you are correct -- these latest versions only contain the USB version whereas those from a couple of versions back had CD-ROM, floppy, USB, and flat-file versions. To be somewhat fair, the newer versions also contain the flat-files, and the "Start.htm" page states:

"ROMPAQ Flat Files

The following option provides flat files of the ROMPAQ media that can be used for network flash. For more information on the ROMPAQ Flat Files, view the ReadMe.txt in the ROMPAQ Flat Files folder."

However, the "Readme.txt" file only says:

Product Name System ROM Image Name
----------------------------------------------------------------------
HP ProLiant DL160 G5 Servers O12 CPQO120x.xxx

and the "README.1ST" is no help either.

Now, I'm sure you could probably use one of the earlier floppy images and update it with the contents of the latest version's "ROMPaq Flat Files" folder, but if something goes horribly wrong, you didn't hear it from me! I'm going to send some feedback to that page and see if I get any response.

[kheller2]

has anyone gotten this to work with the Firmware CD 8.40? I'm trying the NFS version w/o modifying anything on the cd or making a custom initrd for pxe. It says it can't launch/run the update manager.

I haven't tried 8.30.

Also, and interesting tidbit, the SS815 disk says there are no boot disks, or that the controller isn't configured when I use an NFS tree, but if I point to the ISO over NFS it seems to work better.

[Peter Capriccio]

The V8.30 and V8.40 firmware images are working for me -- attached are the corresponding entries I'm using in my PXELINUX "default" file.

Note the "ramdisk_size" changes and in V8.40 they now boot using framebuffer mode (vga=788) -- I'm assuming the latter has something to do with the fact that now I see a graphics progress screen.

I haven't tried any of the CAM methods (Cam, Arco, and/or Madis :) so I can't speak for that, but I intend to as soon as I can -- seems like a much more efficient method and can allow you to be off the network after the initial download.

[kheller2]

Dan, thanks for the update. I had some console and tty lines from the SS boots but what you have works fine but only if you point to the ISO image and not to an extracted rsync/tar of the CD to NFS. If you point to an NFS tree it says it can't start the update manager once you go into the firmware page.

Given this, what is an easy way to inject newer firmware upgrades over nfs than what is on the cd?

[kheller2]

Peter, thanks for the update. Confusing reply menus on this. :)

[kheller2]

Now for SS815, this is my entry:
label SS3
kernel /SS815/vmlinuz
append initrd=/SS815/initrd.img media=network rw root=/dev/ram0 ramdisk_size=111100 init=/bin/init loglevel=3 ide=nodma ide=noraid pnpbios=off mem=4g iso1=nfs://172.20.200.20/mnt3/images/SS815.2009_0122.3-x64.iso

When I boot that it says there are no bootable drives configured on the system - which is wrong. If I point to the NFS tree it works better and gets past that. Odd.

[Peter Capriccio]

Anyone tried SmartStart V8.20? I was hoping the "no modifications" streak would continue for the lazy-man's method of just serving out the ISO image, but all things must pass...

It seems that if left unmodified, it is still mounting the NFS (and would probably do the same for CIFS) export, but they stripped out the magic bits in "cdrom.sh" that make the calls to "mount_url.sh" to automatically loopback mount the ISO (see the attached for the diffs).

For the 32-bit version, I merged the "cdrom.sh" files from V8.15 and V8.20 and it seems to work, although I only tried the Insight Diagnostics (and have yet to try the 64-bit version). But this means I had to update the initrd.img -- my quest for the ultimate in sedentary lifestyles is thwarted again...

[Bill Streeter]

Peter...I'm having the same issues with 8.20 SmartStart ISO. The x64 has the same issue.

[shocko]

Hey guys,
I wonder would any of you linux guru's have a simple solution to the problem of combinging multiple versions of firmware/smartstart on a single USB key (i know this is a different thread but i have looked around and the only other solution would be to make a multi-partition usb key using grub4dos which in fairness looks quite promising). I have a 16gb crosshair that i would love to put multiple versions of the firmware CD onto. This is as far as i have gotten:

Used the HP drive key utility to laod v 8.40 onto a usb. Works fine. Now created a second USB key with version 8.20 and copied all files into the 8.40 SUB stick in a sub-directory called 8.20. I renamed the kernel/initrd files and added them to my vesamenu. All booting fine but the Smart Update Manager can't load 8.20!

I understand why. the reason is that 8.20 uses the same directory structure on the USB stick as 8.40 i.e.e \compaq ... etc. Now since i have moved all my 8.20 files into a subdirectory called 8.20, the script that runs in the kernel when linux boots mounts the USB stick alright but the other scripts all proboaly are referebcing the wrong base i.e. /dev/usb instaead of /dev/usb/8.20

Would there be anyway of changing this or would i ahve to trawl thrugh a pile of scripts in the intrd.img file and grep these lines out to refelct the new directory structure?

Thanks in advance guys!