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I'm trying to install Ubuntu 20.04 on a UCS controlled Cisco C240, but no matter what I try, it gives me the error message:

Unable to find a medium container a live file system
Attempt interactive netboot from a URL?

Yes, it's "container" not "containing".

My PXE boot menu looks like this:

    MENU LABEL Install Ubuntu 20 LTS
    KERNEL casper/vmlinuz
    IPAPPEND 1
    APPEND initrd=casper/initrd toram \
        netboot \
        locale=en_US.UTF-8 \
        ip=interface,lo.cal.ip.addy,24,ip.of.gate.way \
        hostname=somehostname \
        nfsroot=ip.of.nfs.mount:/mnt/ubuntu20

It has no trouble loading casper/vmlinuz and casper/initrd, but then seems to ignore everything else on the append lines. Any idea what I might be doing wrong? I can get it to boot off of an HTTP mounted iso, but I'm trying to get this to work without human interaction.

2 Answers 2

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It turns out that the issue wasn't with the parameters, it was with the file format. The menu32 file is intolerant of backslash line-break escaping.

APPEND initrd=casper/initrd toram \ <-- this character here was my problem

When I piled them all up on a single line, it started working. This conundrum has had me blocked for two weeks.

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The netboot option looks wrong. The source suggests the option needs to be at least netboot=. Based on the man page, I'd suggest netboot=nfs

The parameter "nfsroot=" (with optional "nfsopts="), should specify where is the location of the root filesystem. With no args, will try cifs first, and if it fails nfs

The error message you see is in the casper script, although the typo appears to be fixed so you may also be using an older version.

Depending on the image and if you have console access you can try other debugging options. E.g. adding debug= to the arguments and/or an option like break=bottom.

Debugging references

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  • The manpage for this says "without a parameter, it tries cifs first, then nfs". I actually tried both =nfs and =cifs and neither of those worked. May 7, 2021 at 17:15

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