Hey guys,

Before opening up a trouble ticket with MikroTik on this issue and wasting their time, I wanted to see if maybe I was doing something stupid.

I am trying to use Netinstall to do a direct install to a local hard disk, rather than having to have a machine available that is capable of PXE booting when I need to perform an install.

With RouterOS 3.10, I have successfully performed PXE-boot Netinstalls to PATA hard drives and USB media. I even confirmed that I was able to boot off of the USB flash device, and it worked perfectly...hooray!

However, if I hook up the same USB flash drive or the same PATA hard drive up to the system running Netinstall, and I tell Netinstall to install directly to that drive, when I try to boot off of that drive on another computer, I get this:
This happens when I boot this drive off of the same computer that I can successfully use to Netinstall via PXE to the exact same drive (which says "Looking for harddrives...Found harddrive as IDE Primary master (disk C)").

So, when I boot the Linux kernel used with the "remote installation," it can find the hard disk just fine. However, when I boot the Linux kernel used with the "hard disk installation" method, it can't find the hard disk...even though it is the exact same computer with the exact same hard disk.

Why?!?

Same thing with USB flash...Netinstall PXE works great on the USB flash drive ("Found harddrive as SATA 1"), but when I Netinstall DIRECTLY to the USB drive when it is hooked up to a PC, and then boot it off of the same computer that I Netinstall PXE'd to earlier, I get "FATAL ERROR: No hard disk found."

The "hard drive installation" just doesn't seem to work at all for me, while the "remote install" finds my hard drive and works every time. If anybody can help me out, that would be awesome!

Regards,

-- Nathan

Hi Nathan

Please make sure that the PATA drive is the primary drive on the primary IDE interface when installing. Linux and MT doesn't like running of secondary interfaces and also not when it used to be primary and is now secondary.

Please let us know if it works

I experinced the exact same issue with Giepie and am also stuck at the moment. How could it be connected as Primary on a Primary IDE interface when installing from Netinstall, since netinstall runs on windows (which obviously runs on the Primary Drive&Partition) and the Drive to be installed Mikrotik is connected as a secondary drive (meaning that it maybe connected as slave, or on the secondary IDE interface or even connected as a USB removable drive)?

On the page: http://wiki.mikrotik.com/wiki/Netinstall it is said that:

Netinstall can also directly install RouterOS on a disk (USB/CF/IDE) that is connected to the Netinstall Windows machine. After installation just move the disk to the Router machine and boot from it.

The netinstall program will only recognize the target drive if its file system is recognized by windows (namely a FAT, FAT32 or NTFS file system drive). Does the issue have anything to do with the file system selection?


Has anybody had an experience on a successful install in this scenario and would like to share. Some of us really need help on this issue. Thanks for sharing.