Boot a Windows install disc from the network using iPXE and wimboot

A while ago, I showed how you can use a Linux PXE server along with a tool called Serva to PXE boot a Windows installer DVD. By now, there is a much nicer solution available that doesn’t require any Windows tools: iPXE with wimboot. So go ahead and replace your PXELinux setup with iPXE first. Then copy the contents of a Windows installer DVD to your TFTP server and make sure that the folder is also shared read-only via SMB. Now copy the wimboot binary to your TFTP server and add something like the following to your iPXE config file:
set serverip 192.168.200.29
set tftpboot tftp://${serverip}/
set tftpbootpath /mnt/Daten/tftpboot

:menu
menu iPXE boot menu
item --key w win10de Windows 10 16.07 x64 German
choose os
goto ${os}

:win10de
echo Booting Windows Installer...
set root-path ${tftpboot}/ipxe
kernel ${root-path}/wimboot gui
set root-path ${tftpboot}/Win10_1607_German_x64
initrd ${root-path}/boot/bcd BCD
initrd ${root-path}/boot/boot.sdi boot.sdi
initrd ${root-path}/sources/boot.wim boot.wim
initrd ${root-path}/boot/fonts/segmono_boot.ttf segmono_boot.ttf
initrd ${root-path}/boot/fonts/segoe_slboot.ttf segoe_slboot.ttf
initrd ${root-path}/boot/fonts/segoen_slboot.ttf segoen_slboot.ttf
initrd ${root-path}/boot/fonts/wgl4_boot.ttf wgl4_boot.ttf
boot || goto failed

That’s it. When you boot this boot menu entry, you’ll be presented with the Windows installer, but if you click through it, it will at some point ask you for a driver because it can’t find its installer packages. So before you click through, hit Shift-F10 and execute the following commands to set up the network, mount the SMB share and re-execute the installer:
wpeinit
net use s: \\192.168.200.29\tftpboot\Win10_1607_German_x64 bar /user:foo
s:\sources\setup.exe

If your SMB server is running Samba, the user you specify (foo) must not exist on the server so you force it to use anonymous authentication. With a Windows server, things might be different.

That should give you a working installer that will get your Windows running within a few minutes because Gigabit Ethernet has a much bigger bandwidth than a spinning DVD or a cheap USB flash drive.

Serva did have one advantage, however: when you set it up, you could inject network drivers into the boot image. With Windows 10, luckily, that has become a non-issue: Microsoft releases a new installer ISO for it about once a year, which you can directly download and which should contain all drivers for the latest hardware available when it was released.

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