WinPE 2.0 NIC Card

[dthakkar]

Hi I am working on unattended install of Windows 2K3 Server using Winpe2.0.

We have two Broadcom NICs on IBM Servers Labeled "Local Area Connection" and "Local Area Connection 2". I want to assign fixed IP to the first Netowk Card using Netsh. The problem I have is how do I identify which NIC card is the First Network Card under WinPE using WMI or any other scripts?

In our Environment NIC Card labeled LAN1 on the back of the IBM Server should be configured for Prod and LAN2 to be configured for backup.

Any ideas?

Thanks,

[Tripredacus]

That'll be pretty tough. There's not much parity between the physical connections outside and the information about those connections. You wouldn't be able to tell other than whichever one Windows finds first, that is the one it makes 1, and the second is 2. There is no garauntee it won't find the second adapter first.

Can you see the MAC Addresses for the NICs in the BIOS at all? Do both have the same Hardware ID?

[dthakkar]

I cannot see MAC Address in the BIOS. For now what I have done is unplug the cable from NIC-2 and only plug the cable onto NIC-1.

Then I dump IPConfig /ALL to a text file and wrote a script to identify the card other then the one that says "Media Disconnected". I then get the Adapter Name and MAC Address from IPConfig /ALL and use Adapter Name to assign IP with Netsh and populate Unattend Text file with MAC Address.

[WreX]

You could experiment with what shows up in WMI in the Win32_NetworkAdapter class and see if the adapters that are listed with the lower DeviceID or Index values correspond to how Windows Server 2003 detects them. You might luck out and find that the lower-numbered adapter actually gets the first "Local Area Connection" title.

[Jazkal]

This is dependent on where the NIC's sit on the PCI bus on that motherboard design. I've seen some motherboards with a slight revision where the NIC enumeration is different, because they made minor motherboard changes which changed the PCI Bus design.

dthakkar, your current solution is the best that I have come up with. If someone else has a better idea, I'd like to hear it also.