painbreak

I would go a different route and change the pxelinux/syslinux default menu to add that as an option there rather than in the BCD.

You, my friend, are a god among men. Thanks!

The topic pretty much explains it... I've got WinPE 2.1 PXE booting, but some of my utilities (for setting asset tags, etc) only run on DOS, so I need to come up with a way to boot to my dos images from PXE. Previously, I could just use 3com's el-junko pxe boot menu tool, but I have no idea how to make it work with WinPE. If anyone has a tutorial on this, that would help tremendously.

It's going to be a pain in the a** to get the computer name from the registry, because you'd have to mount the hives sitting in system32\config and then be able to edit them automatically somehow. It'd be a lot easier to create a GPO that runs on every computer that simply calls this batch file: @echo off echo %computername% > c:\windows\computername.txt That way, in your startnet.cmd you can do something like... set /p oldpcname=>c:\windows\computername.txt So, you hang onto that variable and image the machine... Then once it's imaged, you inject that into your sysprep.inf. I haven't found a good find and replace tool that works in WinPE 2.1 yet...so you could copy the sysprep.inf to the PE image, sans the ComputerName= portion, have another text file called sysprep1.txt that had this: [userData] ComputerName = Then you could echo %oldpcname% > whatever.txt and mash them together with copy /b whatever.txt + sysprep1.txt + sysprep.inf c:\sysprep\sysprep.inf It's a Charlie Foxtrot way to go about it, but it got the job done for me...

Naming a computer and adding to the domain with netdom is quite easy, and reliable. The only issue that I'm coming across is when I reimage a computer, I want it named the same as it was, and to stay in the same OU. It errors out that the account already exists...which I realize. Resetting the account in AD doesn't seem to make any difference. Now, if I don't automate it, and let it prompt me for the computer name at the end of the mini-setup so that it joins the domain, I can give it the old computer name and it joins up, retains its place in the original OU, and all is well. What are they doing differently in sysprep that allows this to happen? Is there any way to join a computer to the domain with an existing computer account other than this? I don't want to have to delete the computer account and try to remember what OU it goes in before I rename it.

I believe Aaron Sorkin once said, "Good writers borrow from other writers. Great writers steal from them outright." In that vein, I'm the absolute best at writing scripts... Thanks for the link. I'll more than likely dig through what you've got and invariably find a piece or two that applies to what I'm doing, or find something that's done more elegantly than I'm currently implementing. I'll post some of my less-than-pretty code sometime... I'm a member of the old school, so I do everything that I can (and sometimes, things that rightfully, I can't) with batch files.

If I can find the MAC addy on the box, that'd make my not-so-elegant, but freakin' awesome solution work pretty well. I'm sure I've got an old HP box sitting around somewhere, so if that's the case, I'm pretty well set there. Yeah, WMI is an absolutely amazing tool for admins like myself who have an over-abundance of machines to take care of...but it's pretty pathetic sometimes what you find in there. We've got some tablets at work that respond "Gateway " for all of the fields. I'm sure the extra spaces are for posterity!

This project has been in the works off and on for the last few years, and I'd like to get some input and ideas about how others might go about doing something like this, or possibly are currently making it happen. Ideally, I'd like to be able to go to a computer, hit F12 and walk away. It would boot from the network, begin the imaging process, reboot, name itself to current conventions (rather than a random name, it would be named according to the room or user), join itself to the domain, and put itself in the appropriate OU. Once in the OU, a Group Policy Object would run, and based on the name it would load a particular set of programs onto the computer. We have a relatively diverse set of computers, but with custom driver packs and some tweaking we've been able to create a single ghost image that works for 95% of our systems. The PXE booting aspect I took care of long, long ago, but naming is where I'm getting stuck a bit. I've written a script that can run at first boot that will rename the computer to a specified name that uses Netdom. Currently I have a simple batch file running as a GPO that executes once on all of the computers, and kicks out a text file named %macaddress%.txt that contains one line, which is the computer name. With the script that runs as admin at first login, it grabs its mac address, sets it as a variable (%mac%) then sets the contents of \\networkserver\%mac%.txt as %oldname% and uses that as its new name. Netdom will name it the old name, and join it to the domain, so all's well there. The issue is that each summer I get about 1000 new machines to set up, so I'd like to be able to have a way to pre-specify a name for the new PCs as well. The outside of the box has the serial number as a barcode, but I don't believe it has the MAC address as a barcode. I'm thinking about going to serial numbers as the unique identifier rather than MAC address, but the issue with that is that WMI repositories are notoriously hosed, and even if you un-hose it, if a vendor or service provider replaces the motherboard on a system, they don't enter the asset tags and you end up with a bunch of machines that have no serial number, or all zeros. Does anyone have a better idea as a usable unique identifier? I realize this kind of skips all over the place, but hopefully someone's able to follow my ramblings and make some sense of it. Thanks for the help!