WinAoE
Welcome to WinAoE
WinAoE is an open source GPLv3 driver for using AoE (ATA over Ethernet) on Microsoft Windows(tm).
It can be used to disklessly boot Windows 2000 through Vista 64 from an AoE device (virtual vblade or realCoraid device), or can be used as a general AoE access driver.
How to use WinAoE
Download the latest version below and read the readme.txt file.
For general AoE access it is sufficient to just install the driver (using "Control Panel", "Add Hardware", until I make an installer). After installing you can use the "aoe" command in a command prompt window to mount and unmount AoE drives (type "aoe" for a help screen).
For diskless booting, you also need to set up your network driver to start at boot in the registry (see the readme.txt for that). After this, you can image the drive to a vblade, or put it in a Coraid enclosure and boot over PXE, using either gPXE or the included aoe.0
Read the readme.txt for the latest information.
WARNING!
This is still an experimental driver, although it has been used flawlessly on my own system for the past 2 years (having been put through a few TB of data), it might not work for you!
Important! The 0.97f version implemented a new scheduler which appeared to be very slow. 0.97g fixes this. To update, copy the aoe32/64.sys to C:\Windows\system32\drivers and aoe.exe to C:\Windows\system32 and reboot. For questions feel free to visit the IRC channel.
Download: winaoe-0.97g.zip (older versions)
More information and how to contact me
For more information and to contact me, the preferred method is IRC, the #etherboot channel on the FreenodeIRC network. You can also reach me through this contact form (I don't post email addresses online), although I will only reply if it is absolutely necessary.
As a last note, if you would like to contribute patches to this driver, I only accept patches which are released under the public domain. Include a small header releasing the patch as public domain in order to do that. This is so that I would be able to relicense the driver for specific usage if the situation of some company demands that.
That being said, the driver itself will always be available through GPL, as that is the primary release license.
If you would like to contribute in any other way, please visit the irc channel or use the contact form.
Some useful links to helpful people and software
| Etherboot/gPXE by Marty Connor (mdc) & Michael Brown (mcb30). | |
| The etherboot project is being used by lots of people to netboot systems all over the world. The new and brilliant gPXE loader expands on the foundation of etherboot by adding in things like booting over http, booting over iSCSI and of course booting over AoE. Thanks in general to mdc for the incentive to release this driver and generally keeping a good mood, and mcb30 for debugging and making gPXE compatible with booting Windows over AoE. | |
| SYSLINUX by H. Peter Anvin (hpa). | |
| SYSLINUX is a very nice piece of work to boot a host of different systems. It includes PXELINUX which can be used to make a PXE enabled boot menu, usable together with gPXE or WinAoE to choose between booting Windows or Linux over the network. Also a general thanks for hpa with pointers and debugging. | |
| Coraid. | |
| The inventors of AoE. They helped to make the release of this driver possible. Do not contact them for support though, see above. | |
And lastly I want to thank my alpha/beta testers to find new and exciting bugs to fix! (you know who you are).
— V.
