Microsoft iSCSI Software Target The virtual disk cannot be created on the selected volume. Catastrophic failure..
And a similar error when attempting to import an existing disk -
Microsoft iSCSI Software Target The wizard was unable to import one or more virtual disks. The operation failed with error code 0x8000ffff. Catastrophic failure..
Erwan as per usual was not experiencing these errors and was able to create/import vhd files from all accessible drives. Another source of frustration for me - not the fact that Erwan could, the fact that I couldn't! (maybe both )
I have now traced the reason why I was experiencing these errors on some drives and not others to the Windows system protection feature. With Protection enabled (and space allocated for it) on the drive in which I wanted to create a Virtual Disk, Microsoft iSCSI Software Target was able to successfully create and import disks.
I realise that I'm now using this thread as a notepad so that when I get around to writing stuff up I can use it to remind myself about what I've been doing
Just checked. .NET is pre-installed - .NET Framework 4.5. Version 3.5 needs to be manually turned on and an internet connection is then required to enable it....I thought that since Vista there a pre installed dotnet : I could be wrong thus...
That would be great when you have time. I have emailed Anton at StarWind to report the issue....About latest starwind, I'll give it another go as I thought I had success there : i should have taken notes ...
This sums up the fact that there is a lot that we just don't know and Windows setup acts strangely. Remember my issues with Setup not creating a UEFI system partition or MSR partition on my X230?....About targets not working with uefi and/or gpt (as we still dont know which of these 2 aspects are troublesome), I had the following experience during my tests : using clonedisk, there were some API calls which just failed on me like create disk / create partition.
It is as if GPT was simply not understood/supported.
Surprisingly thus, it may be that the windows setup does not report these errors (at least not in the front end).
I should redo the following test : create an iscsi target, spare me the stage 1 / stage 2 long experiment, and simply send a create disk / create partition both on MBR and GPT to various software.
So we can clearly list some targets which already will fail at stage 1.
Not 100% that simple thus as I was able to sanhook/stage 1 with ms target and continue with sanboot/stage2 with starwind 5.
So next to the possible gpt not supported (in stage 1) by some softwares (like kernsafe, i.e we can assert the disk is NOT fine), there is also this other issue where sanhook/stage 1 goes fine (i.e we can assert the disk IS fine) but sanboot/stage 2 does not go fine.
There is one consistent item in there thus : we know that ipxe is not the issue and we have been using the same client(s) all along.
Tip : you can have multiple targets installed on your client but it is a bit of a PITA as you need to start/stop services then.
net start StarWindService ... net stop wintarget ... net stop iStorageService
Once again, iscsiconsole comes in handy as it is a standalone executable
I keep consoling myself with the fact that we now know a lot more than we did. And iSCSI Console is a great find.
Misty