Win11 22H2 iSCSI boot failed on my mini-PC 'SER7' after installation finished.

[imyzcn]

Here are those details of my hardware & software environment:

• Mini-PC: Bee-Link SER7 (https://www.bee-link.com.cn/catalog/product/index?id=681)

• NIC：Realtek Gaming 2.5GbE Family (Controller RTL8125B)

• APU: AMD 7840HS with Radeon 780M

• RAM: 16GBx2 Crucial DDR5-5600 SODIMM

• Audio: Realtek Audio

• iPXE: 1.21.1+ (g929f)

• WinPE ver.: 10.0.19041 (WinADK 2004, https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?linkid=2120254)

Here is the case, in order to have Win11 22H2 installed into and then booted from an iSCSI target, I customized a WinPE according to this post: #324. With that customized WinPE and iPXE(ipxe.efi/snponly.efi), I was able to achieve the goal through any of UEFI VMs of ESXi 8.0U2’s in either of the following 2 ways:

P1: iPXE sanhook -> chain wdsmgfw.efi -> WDS WinPE -> install/restart -> iPXE sanhook -> sanboot -> Win11 boot;

P2: iPXE sanhook -> chain wimboot WinPE -> install/restart -> iPXE sanhook -> sanboot -> Win11 boot.

Besides, I also tried to do the same on my Intel NUC9, and the result indicated that only the P2 succeeded, and the P1 always stuck at the step ‘WDS WinPE’, i.e., Windows logo appeared and then system stopped responding. However, I don’t really take it as a bad news, because, as you may know, NUC9 itself has an iSCSI Configurator(iBFT ready), which makes iPXE non-mandatory.

The bad news is that both of the P1 & P2 did NOT work on my newly-purchased mini-PC ‘SER7’ with the exactly same WinPE.wim & ipxe.efi. And of course, no any iSCSI Configurator ships with the UEFI/BIOS of SER7’s, and that fact leaves iPXE definitely the only hope for me. Now, that hope seems vanishing, because P1 failed as it does on NUC9, and P2 was just able to accomplish most of its processes, and always fell at its last step after sanboot, i.e., Win11 boot kept on running into the BSOD - ‘INACCESSIBLE_BOOT_DEVICE’. And I’m 100% sure that the NIC driver was installed into the offline image by issuing the command from WinPE: Dism /image:C: /Get-Drivers…. Otherwise, I couldn’t have gone that far to the step ‘sanboot’ at the first place. FYI, both of ipxe.efi & snponly.efi indicated the NIC driver as 'NII' during loading.

After many attempts on my SER7 to try to get it through were all failed, I still have no clue what went wrong at all. And, where did the problem exist? The driver of NIC’s? Or the UEFI/BIOS of SER7’s? The symptom says that iPXE finished its job already and then handed out the bootloader to Win11 loader…please correct me if I was wrong. And, I’d be appreciate it if someone could shed light on this problem.

Apart from that, I’d like to know why WinPE loaded by wdsmgfw.efi(WDS), which was chain-loaded by iPXE, always stuck on both of my NUC9 & SER7 while it worked pretty fine on VM of ESXi8’s?