PXE booting not working on one model of PC - any ideas?

[sidewinder]

We' ve just purchased 50 Dell Vostro 320's (all in one design) and I am trying to test Windows 7 on them. We usually have Optiplex's which boot without fail into Deployment services/Lite Touch etc. But these new ones have a different BIOS and different NIC (Realtek opposed to Intel) and just sits there on boot trying to get an IP address and never does.

I've enabled everything I can see in BIOS (the BIOS on these are terrible compared to Dell's usual offerings) but no joy.

 

No new BIOS updates so what can I try? Why would it not get an IP address when everything else I boot (including laptops with Realtek NIC's) work fine?

 

I'll contact Dell if need be but I just cant see what they could do :-/

[plexer]

Gigabit nics? If so have you tried slowing them down?

 

Ben

[sidewinder]

No option in BIOS for that. I've tried it both connected to a 10/100 and a gigabit switch and no difference.

 

I've got a bit further - I missed it all the times before, but it flashes up a message before it moves to the next boot device: "proxydhcp did not respond on port 4011"

So I looked in DHCP and the machine is actually getting assigned an IP address, just something stops it after that. The only DHCP option we have configured for PXE is option 60, and this works fine for everything else. The WDS and DHCP servers are on seperate machines if that makes any difference

[Martin]

Option 60 tells the client to try to boot from the same machine that it got a DHCP address from but you want it to boot from a different one.

 

Thus try removing Option 60.

 

mb

[sidewinder]

Ok, removed that and sure enough, it does get an IP address straight away. But then receive a Windows Boot Manager screen saying Windows failed to start.

 

And even weirder, without option 60 it now doesnt work on the Optiplex's - they get a PXE-E51 error - No DHCP or ProxyDHCP offers were received. These have Intel NIC's

[sidewinder]

OK now they're both working...must have taken a bit of time to kick in

 

The boot manager error on closer inspection, was due to it going to the wrong server - the DHCP server, probably because of option 60

 

So no option 60 now and a couple of WDS restarts and it seems ok

[pritchardavid]

Sometimes a BIOS update is a good idea, has I had a WDS problem today, has it wouldn't respond to the ftp server on it. After I done the BIOS update, it worked fine!

[foana]

OK now they're both working...must have taken a bit of time to kick in

 

The boot manager error on closer inspection, was due to it going to the wrong server - the DHCP server, probably because of option 60

 

So no option 60 now and a couple of WDS restarts and it seems ok

 

Hi Sidewinder,

 

I currently have exactly the same situation as you. A client has puchased 10 Dell Vostro 320 all in one machines which I have created an image for and uploaded to WDS.

 

In your previous post you mentioned you had a boot error after loading the image, would it happen to be 0xc000000f?

 

I have that exact error and although you seem to have resolved your issue it is not clear how you were able to get past the boot error?

 

Any feedback would be appreciated.

[sidewinder]

Hi foana

 

My error was before I had loaded the image, it appeared immediately after the client had got an IP address. It seemed that instead of loading the boot image from the WDS server, it was looking on our DHCP server and of course it couldnt find a boot image there. I only noticed after about 10 boots and I saw the IP address at the top of the screen displaying the error was not of the WDS server that I worked it out.

 

So I think it might be slightly different to your issue? Mine was more with my server configuration rather then the specific model of PC - in face I've now imaged 50+ Vostro 320's successfully

[Cools]

I had the same problem it turned out to be the Samsung digital sign-age software was trying to dish out PXE info. it caused big problems with FOG....

[foana]

Thanks Sidewinder.

 

Forgive my lack of terminology but my issue appears to have been resolved after rebuilding the drive bcd and boot.ini with shadowprotect.

 

Appears as though some kind of Dell bootloader was causing issues with the image after having been pulled down from WDS.

 

Thanks for your replies.

[Angel]

SOLVED (FOR US AT LEAST]

We had the same problems with the same model in two different schools and it seems to be a glitch in the keyboard.

After pressing F12 for booting from the network F12 key stops working due to "whatever", so then press Fn + F12 and you should be able to boot from the network without problems.

Hope it helps