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Hetzner UEFI Boot
Hi, was hoping someone could weigh in on properly configuring a hetzner MSI H87-G43 mobo machine for a windows UEFI boot.
I connected via KVM console (LARA?) and discovered the default boot device is the network interface.
This by default loads a PXE image, that offers two options, network boot or local boot.
Local boot only works for non UEFI images it seems. Whenever selecting option l (local) or waiting the timer out it says to insert bootable media and try again.
Under the network boot option of the PXE image, there is an option to press TAB to edit the local boot option, but it is password protected.
Now it seems I can boot the UEFI image if I set the windows boot loader device to a higher priority in the BIOS, but then I loose the ability to boot the Rescue OS from Robot (no more net booting if UEFI booting works).
I'm not confident in using LARA as the only rescue service, as when I took a MBR version of windows and ran MBR2GPT on it, and booted it with the KVM attached, it just booted to a black screen, with a working mouse cursor and a blue loading wheel constantly spinning next to it. (RDP also worked, but only for 10 second bursts) As such, I've currently gone back to MBR, as I wasn't able to get past that using safe mode or any of the other windows recovery environment tools.
Any idea on how to setup the machine to do windows UEFI without loosing access to the Rescue OS environment?
Comments
You’d need to flash UEFI PXE to the network card and I’m sure Hetzner wouldn’t appreciate it and could charge you for restoring it.
Furthermore, UEFI PXE would need to be supported by both recovery OS and DHCP server.
I wouldn’t touch the above.
Your other option is to use some mixed booting if the mobo supports it. Or let it go.
Make a support request! They will sort it out pretty quickly.
Hi. I use the following workaround for the described problem. It is possible to change the efi boot order within windows with bcdedit. You will find details here: https://blog.mussard.org.uk/2014/05/30/efi-dualboot-changing-efi-nvram-boot-order-from-windows/
So, I changed the boot order to boot windows first and network second. If I need to boot into the rescue system, I have to change the efi boot order via bcdedit first. If the HDD fails, it will boot from network anyway... Maybe, in some rare cases I will need the KVM device.
Erwin
PS. I installed Windows via qemu, uefi mode.
Thanks Clouvider and feezioxiii, I'll try submitting a support ticket for having a UEFI PXE flashed to the NIC.
Good to know erwin, I'll look at configuring it that way.
Booting Windows in an UEFI setting over PXE is a pain without Windows Deployment Services (aka Microsoft's PXE server suite).
Throw in Secure Boot in the mix, and things just got much more painful.
LEt us know how it goes and how you managed to do it so if anyone in the future has the same problem they can use this thread
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