WDS problems with Dell Mini 1011`s

[dombera]

Hi all!

I got a problem with WDS and dell mini`s 1011 on my network. Sometime ago we have set up a WDS server on Win 2008 R2. Everything works fine apart from 1011 laptops. While other machines are picking up wds server very quickly 1011 mini`s take very long time to pick up wds server, they got stuck for a very long time at the TFTP stage and than just quits network boot. We have many other machines such us dell vostros, toshiba laptops, acer aspire one laptops (they got exactly the same network card as 1011 minis and they work fine), etc and they work perfect with our wds..

 

I have injected the network drivers into my boot.wim but with no luck. The funny part is that acer`s got the same network adapter and they are just fine.

Mini`s 1011 have most recent bios updated.

 

Does anyone has a similar issue with dell mini 1011 laptops?

Is this just a firmware, dell bios problem?

Any advice what should I try?

[ihaveaproblem]

We have some computers that freeze on the screen when trying to deploy an image with wds. It was due to the network card not supprting 1gb. Connecting it to a port set as 100mb solved the problem.

Maybe this is the same problem for you?

[SYNACK]

A bad implementation of PXE is probably the cause, we had a bunch of hps that played this game untill a bios upgrade, as your machines already have the latest bios dell have obviously not fixed it. We got round it by burning a WDS boot CD and using that to boot the offending machines. You could do this and then use one of the utilities to put it on a USB key so that you can boot the netbooks off it.

[dombera]

Thanks guys! I`ll change the speed of my server nic to 100mb full and see how it goes. Also thanks for suggesting boot cd or usb. I didn`t even knwo you can do it this way. Thanks, will post the results