As an important step towards automating the creation of Windows disk assets/images, we will take a closer look at the Critical Device Database (CDDB) inside the Windows registry. The goal is to transform any locally installed instance to be bootable from iSCSI without having to run a full installation onto an iSCSI disk before.
In this article, we will describe how an ordinary Windows 7 installation can be converted to be booted from iSCSI. We will cover the particularities of the Windows network boot process and and elaborate on the differences to the normal boot. We then describe our solution using some registry modifications.
This series of three posts is about installing Windows 7 on an iSCSI disk. In this first article, we install it using qemu and iPXE and cover some of the pitfalls and particularities of this install method, as well as the topic of duplicating the resulting disk for use in machines of the same type. Two more follow-up posts will cover details of the network boot process, leading to a method of converting an existing installation to be iSCSI-bootable.
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