Trying to PXE boot - Failing Badly...

[ihaveaproblem]

Hi,

 

I feel a little bit daft asking this.

I'm trying to pxe boot a laptop so I can deploy an image using WDS. I've set the boot order in the bios to Network as the first boot sequence and disabled everything else.

 

Every time the laptop boots up it says no media found ????

Why is it saying this? Why's it not doing the usual thing of obtaining an IP from DHCP and then saying press F12 to blah blah blah.

 

The laptop has a 100% working cat5 cable connected. I'm really confused and feel rather silly right now.

Anyone got some ideas?

 

thank you

[dhicks]

I've set the boot order in the bios to Network as the first boot sequence

 

But have you actually enabled the "network boot" feature of your BIOS? It's often an extra feature that, for some reason, is left off by default (one of those little jokes BIOS writers like to throw in, along with "No keyboard detected - press F1 to continue"...). You might find an option in a "built in peripherals" section of the BIOS.

[Andie]

I'm not sure if I'm being equally silly, but have you enabled the On Board LAN Boot ROM? You have to do that in a different part of BIOS, and I can't for the life of me remember where, but it's a separate tab and it relates to on-board bits (LAN card, video, etc). Sorry - someone will know what I'm talking about and give us the correct place!

[ihaveaproblem]

Yep... you two were correct. I was being a fool and didnt enable the boot from pxe option in the NIC settings.

How silly of me^^ I've done this 100's... if not 1000's of times and today I was clearly having a blank head.

 

Thanks for waking me up!

[oxide54]

this caught me out the other day, slightly different cause though, machine had two nics, and I was plugged in the PCI one not the motherboard one