Windows 10 ISO won't boot with OVMF, fine with SeaBIOS

[jadelclemens]

Hey all,

I'm having trouble even getting a Windows 10 ISO to boot with OVMF - not even trying to setup anything like PCIe passthrough right now. The ISO boots fine on a SeaBIOS VM so I'm sure it's not the problem, but I'll still try a different ISO when I get the chance.

On boot (after Proxmox logo) I see a list of messages corresponding to attached devices "failed to load Bootxxxx [...] from [device]: Not Found", then it tries to PXE boot and finally drops me into an EFI shell.

At the EFI shell, I've tried navigating to the boot ISO (FS0 and running the efi executables within - bootmgr and bootmgr.efi do nothing and give an error "Command Error Status: Unsupported". efi\boot\bootx64.efi flashes the screen as if changing the resolution, but quickly drops me back to the EFI shell.

Next, exiting from the EFI shell which takes me to the OVMF menu: trying to boot from a file (Boot Maintenance Manager->Boot From File->bootmgr.efi or efi\boot\bootx64.efi) does nothing as well. Running bootx64.efi this way has the same effect as running it from the EFI shell but of course drops me back to the OVMF menu.
Manually selecting a boot option (Boot Manager->Choose Disk) does nothing.
If I instead try to add one of the two EFI files as a boot option and reboot, I get, for example, "loading bootx64.efi from [...]", "starting bootx64.efi", and then "failed to start bootx64.efi [...]: Invalid Parameter".

Wondering if there's a config option or some parameter to add to the boot option that can help me here.

 

[Stefan_R]

This should be working - I just tested it with the official Windows 10 21H1 ISO as an IDE CD drive on an OVMF VM - works fine. Could you post your VM config? ('qm config <vmid>') You should have the ISO's drive set up as bootable in the "boot order" options tab.

Also, try and boot a non-windows, e.g. ubuntu or similar ISO on the VM to see if it works.

 

[jadelclemens]

Hey, sorry for the delay - haven't had much time to work on this recently.

The VM config is

bios: ovmf
boot: order=ide2;virtio0;net0
cores: 8
cpu: host
efidisk0: local-lvm:vm-666-disk-1,size=4M
ide0: local:iso/virtio-win-0.1.190.iso,media=cdrom,size=489986K
ide2: local:iso/Windows 10 Pro en-US v1909 x64 BiT Activated.iso,media=cdrom
machine: q35
memory: 8192
name: mado
net0: e1000=EA:75:00:40:9A:41,bridge=vmbr0,firewall=1
numa: 0
ostype: win10
scsihw: virtio-scsi-pci
smbios1: uuid=85fb2699-97df-4861-ab6f-685a8c1bcd7f
sockets: 1
vga: memory=512
virtio0: local-lvm:vm-666-disk-0,cache=writethrough,discard=on,size=200G
vmgenid: 26e980ab-56f2-4711-9b4f-dd634a42506f

following some other guides for Windows on OVMF.

The machine does boot up fine with a Linux ISO. Using a different Windows ISO I get to the Windows Boot Manager with an error (code 0xC0000225), so that's progress I guess.

EDIT: I have managed to get to the install screen by manually booting BOOTx64.EFI from the OVMF menu, so I guess it was just an issue with my ISO.

 

[Jay Hova]

I can confirm that this is in fact the case. While attempting to recover a VM I discovered that several tools would not boot from ISO until I changed the BIOS back to SeaBIOS.

example https://pogostick.net/~pnh/ntpasswd/