iPXE Windows from a Synology NAS

Master Disaster · July 14, 2020

This ones just a fun project. Trying to setup PXE from my Synology and I've hit a brick wall.

The guide I followed didn't seem to work for me however I discovered (by using VMWare) that the issue is being caused by UEFI. If I set a VM to BIOS it boots perfectly, as soon as I set it to UEFI it does the same as my physical machine. It downloads the boot file fine but then spits out an error (that goes away so fast I've not even been able to get a picture of it) and reboots back to UEFI. My suspicion is the boot file I'm using is not EFI compliant (its SysLinux).

I then moved on to an MS guide on how to do it specifically for Windows 10 PE on a UEFI system. Followed the guide, created the Win PE ISO using ADK, added network drivers to the image, copied all the PXE boot files and the boot.wim over to the PXE folder on my NAS (along with a few custom PXE kernel files that I found on a Dell forum specifically designed to boot wim files over PXE on UEFI) but then the guide says I have to set DHCP option 66 & 67 to tell the server where the boot files are located. In the DHCP server settings on my NAS I can set DHCP options however option 66 & 67 are both missing (the list goes from 65 to 68). I've tried to boot anyway and it does download the boot file and load the PXE WIM Kernel but then it says "Could not locate file or folder" and freezes.

Am I missing something obvious or is it because of the missing DHCP options?