Boot gets stuck after PXE agent exits

Question

After installing Ubuntu via PXE onto one of our new servers, the machine keeps getting stuck here on boot:

Intel(R) Boot Agent GE v1.3.27
Copyright (C) 1997-2008, Intel Corporation
CLIENT MAC ADDR: 00 30 48 FF 96 2C  GUID: 99845D56 9B90 FE2D 39E6 003048FF962C
PXE-E51: No DHCP or proxyDHCP offers were received.

PXE-M0F: Exiting Intel Boot Agent.

When I configure the DHCP server to send PXE replies to this machine again, it PXE boots fine, but it just hangs like this when there are no PXE offers.

I'm not sure why it would stop here with no additional messages. Any clues why?

Answer 1

There are a few things this could be:

1. As Keith mentioned, the BIOS boot order may not have the hard drive listed.
2. (This is what actually happened to me) your boot loader is not actually installed properly. In my case, I'm using a relatively old installer which is only partly aware of GPT partitioning. GPT partitions the disk correctly but then GRUB doesn't get installed correctly. The short term fix for me was to use the SSD, which has enough blocks to be partitioned using MBR partitioning, as the boot device, instead of the larger RAID volume.

Answer 2

You are still trying to PXE boot, but you should be booting to the disk where you installed Ubuntu. The server should then proceed onto the next boot device after not getting PXE options. You could also hit escape when the network boot agent starts doing its thing.

Go into setup/BIOS/EFI and make sure that the boot devices (and order) are sane (probably not).

Answer 3

If the PXE boot was the last available boot device, and it failed, it will stop there.

If you want failover for this, ensure that there is another bootable device with a lower priority. Some BIOSes also allow you to automatically reboot in this case, but this is rare.