PXE ESXi 5.5 installation failed: Boot failed: press a key to retry, or wait for reset ..

[Ashish1]

I have prepared a PXE server to install ESXi 5.5 builds. To do this I have followed steps from below URL.

http://www.geeksecrets.net/pxe-booting-vmware-esxi/

Now when I select ESXi-5.5.0-20140902001 from PXE menu, I can see it is loading ESXi installer screen as attached screenshot-1

But after some time during loading misc_cni.v00 module, installation gets stuck and shows an error as “Boot failed: press a key to retry, or wait for reset …” screenshot-2

Somewhere I read that PXE doesn’t support more than 31 parameters.

I need help to resolve this issue.

PXE server details are as follows.

1. Operating system used for PXE server is SUSE Linux Enterprise 11 (64-bit)

          linux-lkrp:/disk2# uname -a

Linux linux-lkrp 3.0.13-0.27-default #1 SMP Wed Feb 15 13:33:49 UTC 2012 (d73692b) x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

          linux-lkrp:/disk2# cat /etc/SuSE-release

SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 (x86_64)

VERSION = 11

PATCHLEVEL = 2

2. Extra 50GB disk is added for PXE server.

linux-lkrp:/disk2/pxelinux.cfg # df -h

Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on

/dev/sda2       9.2G 4.3G 4.5G  50% /

devtmpfs        497M 128K  497M   1% /dev

tmpfs 497M   88K  497M   1% /dev/shm

/dev/sdb1 50G   34G   14G  72% /disk2

3. NFS configuration file

linux-lkrp:/disk2/pxelinux.cfg # cat /etc/exports

/disk2/pxe *(ro,async,no_subtree_check,no_root_squash,no_all_squash,insecure,nohide,crossmnt)

4. PXELINUX Default file

linux-lkrp:/disk2/pxelinux.cfg # cat default

DEFAULT menu.c32

NOHALT 1

PROMPT 0

TIMEOUT 80

           LABEL ESXi-5.5.0-20140902001

                KERNEL esx/5.5-u2/mboot.c32

                APPEND -c esx/5.5-u2/boot.cfg

                MENU LABEL ESXi-5.5.0-20140902001 ^Installer

LABEL hddboot

     LOCALBOOT 0x80

     MENU LABEL ^Boot from local disk

5. Services running on PXE server

linux-lkrp:/disk2/svt/build # /etc/init.d/apache2 status

Checking for httpd2: running

linux-lkrp:/disk2/svt/build # /etc/init.d/nfs status

Checking for mounted nfs shares (from /etc/fstab): unused

linux-lkrp:/disk2/svt/build # /etc/init.d/nfsserver status

Checking for kernel based NFS server: idmapd running

mountd running

statd running

nfsd