Trouble PXE getting boot priority over USB Flash Drive

[nowwhatnapster]

Hey all,

I'm having some trouble getting the boot order to work correctly on my homemade ESXi box.

In BIOS i have disabled all other boot devices except for the "hard drive" which there is a second menu that lets you shuffle hard drive priority. I have the USB sandisk cruzer listed as the first and only hard drive in that list, all others are disabled.

Here's what happens, bios screen > adaptec card boots > Intel PXE boot press Ctrl+S > initializing Intel Boot Agent PXE, and it stops there.

I have pressed CTRL+S to look at the PXE options but there really isn't much to choose. There are 4 options. One option sets the amount of time to display the CTRL+S message. Another disables the message. Another lets me choose the boot order of which there is only 1 option and that is to use the BIOS boot order. The last one i cant remember, but again there is no option to change anything its more of a statement.

Now here's the thing. If i press F8 when im on the mobo bios boot screen, and i manually tell it to boot to the USB drive it works just fine. ESXi boots up no problem.

So I'm not sure what I'm doing wrong. Presumably the problem is with the Intel network card.

 

[treadstone]

Do you need the PXE boot option?

If not, have you tried to disable it in the BIOS?

 

[Bookmage]

what motherboard/server is this? You may be able to disable the PXE boot option in the intel card..

 

[hotcrandel]

Are you positive your USB drive is bootable? Does your USB drive show up in the BIOS as an option to boot off of? I would revisit the boot settings in your BIOS, and double check that your USB device is bootable.

 

[Red Falcon]

Yes, what make/mobo is this and are you using an add-on NIC or is it the integrated NIC?
Also, have you tried flashing the BIOS to a newer version? There may already be a fix for it.
We need a bit more info before we can help you further.