[wds] PXE UEFi and Bios settings

[newpersn]

Hi all.

 

What changes do i need to make to allow our new laptops to be reimaged via MDT?

 

All our kit works currently with the current setup with Bios. But i have some new kit which doesn't support legacy now.

 

Any pointers would be helpful

 

Thanks

[TechMonkey]

I think the only change we made was to recreate from scratch as a new Task Sequence had the BIOS and UEFI detection built in. I have two steps for partitioning, one labelled for UEFI one for BIOS, and they both have a variable setup in the Options tab for SMSTSBootUEFI. UEFI step is set to equals true, BIOS is set to not true.

 

Not sure if these matter but the BIOS step has disk type set to Standard(MBR) whereas UEFI has it set to GPT. UEFI has 3 partitions, an EFI, an MSR and a primary.

[hellgate24]

Depends how you are PXE booting and if you use VLANs or are on a flat network.

 

If you are using DHCP options to point clients to the boot file for PXE booting, you will need to amend the boot file location to point at the EFI boot file which is needed for UEFI as opposed to the .com file used for BIOS devices. You could go down the route of creating vendor extensions to support both but its a little over complicated, you'd be better off using IP helpers on your switches as it's a neater way of supporting both.

[Norphy]

You need to make sure that your WDS is an appropriate version too, I think 2012 R2 was the first version which supported EFI clients.

[FN-GM]

Depends how you are PXE booting and if you use VLANs or are on a flat network.

 

If you are using DHCP options to point clients to the boot file for PXE booting, you will need to amend the boot file location to point at the EFI boot file which is needed for UEFI as opposed to the .com file used for BIOS devices. You could go down the route of creating vendor extensions to support both but its a little over complicated, you'd be better off using IP helpers on your switches as it's a neater way of supporting both.

 

It’s worth adding that using the DHCP option isn’t officially supported by Microsoft.