sb1920alk

That's a lot of info. Thanks. My interest in updating the rom is pretty low. The cd-to-pxe option is good enough for me for the PCs that don't have another way to pxe boot.

Well, no. You can use - as an example - a BOOT CD that boots grub4dos or Syslinux/Isolinux and from it PXE boot. PXE "assumes" that you have a PXE booting option in BIOS AND a ROM containing the actually PXE booting code in the actual LAN card. But obviously this can be replaced by a PXE booting floppy, which actually is the "right way to experiment": Q: why do you think that rom-o-matic was made: http://www.rom-o-matic.net/ A: As a nice way to have an Etherboot or gPXE: http://etherboot.org/wiki/index.php image built automatically You can have, among others: http://www.rom-o-matic.net/gpxe/gpxe-1.0.1/contrib/rom-o-matic/ floppy CD Rom jaclaz Awesome! This is exactly what I was looking for. I followed the instructions on http://etherboot.org/wiki/removable and have sucessfully PXE booted to WinPE a computer that had no option to do so before. So, are you saying that the NIC does in fact have the ability to PXE boot, but the motherboard simply doesn't have an option to select it? Are there older NICs that simply won't PXE boot even with a disk like this? @Tripredacus: I could burn a WinPE cd and boot from that, but there are things in the boot image that I change from time to time. With a PXE boot, all I have to do is update a file on a file server. With WinPE cds, I'd have to burn a new stack of disks every time I made a change. With the disk I made from the rom-o-matic site, I don't think I'll ever need to burn more than one stack of disks. This is really just for some of the older machines that don't have an option for PXE boot already.

I'm currently booting computers to WinPE using PXE. I have a few older computers who's nics do not have an option to boot to the network. If possible, I would like to boot these computers with a CD that can perform a PXE boot. I would prefer this over simply burning the WinPE image to a CD so that any future changes to the boot image will not require buring a new stack of disks. Has anyone found bootable CD that can PXE boot computers? Thanks,

Problem is solved. DHCP option 43 was set to 0104000000FF on the server that wasn't working and 010400000000FF on the server that was. I'm not sure what that option's purpose is, or who put it there, but after the extra two 0's were added to the first server, PXE boot is working regardless of which server provides an IP address to the client. Thanks for your help

No, that's not it. All of the servers are on a separate subnet from the client machines. This includes the DHCP servers and the TFTP server. The DHCP servers offer different ranges of IPs in the same subnet. That way it doesn't matter if one of them is offline, or which of them answers the client request. It's not exactly in half, but let's say that we split the subnet's range of valid host IP addresses in half. The first half is offered by the first DHCP server, and the second half is offered by the second DHCP server. Something like 10.0.0.1/24 - 10.0.0.127/24 for one server and 10.0.0.128/24 - 10.0.0.254/24 for the other. Also, it's not a TFTP timeout we're experiencing, it's an MTFTP timeout.

I don't think it's being used on any of the servers. The BOOTP tables on both DHCP servers were empty.

Ack...the page timed me out and I lost what I typed... ...anyways, I've narrowed the problem done to the DHCP server. I have two that serve this subnet. I only get the MTFTP hang when it gets its IP from one of the servers. The other server is fine. I timed it and the hang is around 9 and a half minutes, then it proceeds to boot to WinPE without needing to reboot the machine first. I cannot see any difference in the two DHCP servers, except that they offer different ranges of IPs in the same subnet. All of the scope and server options appear identical. Both of them point to the same TFTP server, which is on a different machine. Both are running x86 2003 SP2 (not R2). Ideas?

Well, I'm still getting the occasional MTFTP problem with wdsnbp.com. It's as I thought I remembered it to be - When it works, it identifies the x64 hardware, then boots to WinPE. When it doesn't work, it's the same as I described earlier. So, maybe the issue is before the boot file is loaded?

I'll try it out. I used that one originally, but it didn't seem like it was doing anything but calling pxeboot.com. I did notice that it was identifying x64 computers, which took a few seconds that I didn't feel needed to be taken. I'm using x86 WinPE for everything, so the x64 identification isn't really a concern for me. http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd744541(WS.10).aspx The following outlines the download process. 1.A client is directed (by using DHCP Options or the PXE Server response) to download Wdsnbp.com 2.Wdsnbp.com validates the DHCP/PXE response packet and proceeds to download PXEBoot.com. ... So, the "validates the PHCP/PXE response packet" might be the step that's causing my problem.

What's the difference between each of these files? I would think that wdsnbp.com would be more likely to be used for multicasting than pxeboot.com.

The TFTP server is not firewalled. I'm wondering if it could be the boot file. I'm using pxeboot.com (renamed from pxeboot.n12, so I don't have to press F12 a second time). Also, the only configuring for the service is in the registry, which I found from a blog post. I haven't been able to find any MS documentation on it. ...it did it as I was typing this. For clarification, I rebooted and pressed F12. The screen shows the client mac address and guid, the client IP, mask, and dhcp, the gateway IP, and the last line is MTFTP... It's almost as if it's waiting for a multicast session, which is not what I want. So, I guess my real question is, where are we in the boot process at this point? Is this still part of the NIC's programming, or part of the pxeboot.com file, or something else? Perhaps the server is too overburdened to handle the additional request? Second real question is, does anybody know where some MS documentation on tftpd.exe from the 2003 SP2 install media is?

I am PXE booting WinPE 3.0. I'm using tftpd.exe from the Windows 2003 SP2 install disk installed as a service. Most of the time everything is fine. Sometimes, instead of downloaded the boot image, the screen hangs on MTFTP... right after it gets an IP address. The workaround is to restart and try again. Is there a way to disable this entirely in WinPE, or is the problem somewhere else? Maybe the tftp server, DHCP settings, or switch security?

I am working on an optical disk-based deployment solution. I hope I'll be able to fit it all on one DVD and use a regular old wim file, but it may end up being too big. I noticed imagex can split wims into swm files, so I tried it out. I split my test wim into 5 swms, then used a third-party program to make 5 iso's (I test on VMs for various reasons, including not having to burn disks), each containing one of the swm files. I booted the VM to WinPE and imagex starts, but then fails. I can't think of a way to make it ask me to change disks when it needs the next swm file. I think I might be able to copy the swm files to the hard drive, and then run imagex referencing all of them at once, but that's a lot of extra steps (ideally, my end users will do little more than change disks). I would like to be able to apply the spanned image directly from a series of disks. Any ideas?

...if I uninstall the devices and reboot, they install correctly. I didn't try just running a scan, but I can if that helps. I'll just have to uninstall these problem devices before I capture the image. So, is there an automated method to uninstall all "other devices" listed in Device Manager? I'd like to tack something on to the beginning of my sysprepping script so I don't have to remember one more thing.

I'm running XP Pro SP3. This is part of preparing for a large deployment. I have three devices listed under Other devices in Device Manager. I have downloaded the drivers from the manufacturer's site and extracted them to folders. I have updated the DevicePath reg key to include these folders. If I "scan for hareware changes", the Device Manager screen blinks at me but doesn't install the drivers for these devices. If I right-click on one of them, choose Update Driver, and then choose Install the software automatically, it has no trouble finding the right driver. How can I make it so the drivers will install automatically when I scan for hardware changes or reboot the machine?