PVS Boot Device Management wizard creation of UEFI BDM disks.

• In PVS 2402 and newer, the BDM wizard only shows options related to UEFI BDM creation, as BIOS has been deprecated, and BIOS management interfaces have been removed.
  • This means BDM wizard will look for a locally attached drive with characteristics:
    • Drive initialized as GPT
    • The drive needs to have an EFI partition
    • The partition needs to be formatted with a FAT filesystem. 
• Boot Device Management in PVS 2402 avoids the risk of overriding local windows UEFI boot file, by writing the PVS boot file to a non default name, and adding firmware option to provide possibility to boot that file on local machine. However if using BDM wizard to create a BDM disk for use on other machines, the PVS boot file needs to be renamed to the default UEFI boot name.

 

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Instructions

Steps to create a PVS UEFI BDM disk:

1. Attach a local blank drive to the virtual machine where BDM.exe will be running (usually a PVS server)
2. Use disk management to initialize the drive as a GPT drive
3. Use Diskpart to create EFI partition
   • Diskpart> Create partition EFI size 50
4. Use Diskpart to Format as fat or fat32.
   • Diskpart> format Fs=fat Label=ctxpvs
5. Then use BDM.exe wizard to create the EFI boot folder and PVS boot files.
6. Assign a disk letter to this drive.
7. Using an elevated command prompt navigate to the EFI\Boot\ folder
8. Rename PVSBOOTX64.efi to BOOTX64.efi.
   • BOOTX64.efi is the default boot file that UEFI systems check for on local drives and will execute.
   • PVSBOOTX64.efi name is used in scenarios where we want to keep the windows boot file in the windows EFI partition, but also have an option to PVS boot.
     • In that scenario we add a machine firmware boot option which uses the file name PVSBOOTX64.efi (this firmware option is only added to the local machine where BDM.exe is running)
9. This drive is now ready to boot your PVS targets
   • If the drive will also have other functions, you can create additional partitions and make modifications now.
10. Detach the disk from the system running BDM.exe and then copy and attach the BDM disk to the UEFI PVS target devices. 

 

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