Problem booting Windows PE 2.0 over PXE

[mkuron]

I created a Windows PE 2.0 and set it up to boot over PXE (as described in several places, e.g. Microsoft Technet, Deployvista.com, BootLand.net, Sysadminman.net).

The PXE server (Ubuntu 8.04 with tftpd-hpa for TFTP and dnsmasq for DHCP) works just fine and successfully boots all kinds of Linux and DOS operating systems.

However, when I try to boot Windows PE 2.0, I'm getting an error message:

TFTP download failed
Press any key to reboot.

When looking at the TFTP server's log, I can see the following:

Sep  5 17:08:19 server in.tftpd[18379]: RRQ from 192.168.200.152 filename Boot/startrom.0 
Sep  5 17:08:20 server in.tftpd[18380]: RRQ from 192.168.200.152 filename / 
Sep  5 17:08:20 server in.tftpd[18380]: sending NAK (0, Is a directory) to 192.168.200.152

I'm using PXELINUX to run startrom.0.

But even if I'm having my DHCP server tell the client to boot Boot/pxeboot.com directly, I'm getting the same error.

Sep  5 17:03:39 server in.tftpd[18304]: RRQ from 192.168.200.152 filename Boot/pxeboot.com 
Sep  5 17:03:39 server in.tftpd[18306]: RRQ from 192.168.200.152 filename / 
Sep  5 17:03:39 server in.tftpd[18306]: sending NAK (0, Is a directory) to 192.168.200.152

It seems like WinPE's PXE loader requests / from the TFTP server, which obviously won't work.

I already searched the forum for help, but everybody else is having problems at a later stage (e.g. BCD not found or messed up, bootmgr.exe in the wrong place, etc.). However, none of these apply to my problem because at this stage, BCD or bootmgr.exe aren't even involved yet (otherwise, I would see them being downloaded in the TFTP server's log).

Thanks for your help!

[mkuron]

Well, I found a really weird solution to this problem:

If I have my TFTP server remap the request for / to bootmgr.exe, it works fine.

This is my TFTP remap file:

rg \\ /
r /$ bootmgr.exe