Ntdetect failed during PXE Boot

[Ahmed-26]

Hello There,

Good Day,

This is Ahmed Mounir from London.

I've been working around with microsoft RIS and how to boot an ERD Commander cd image via PXE boot. I did setup the RIS server successfully and created a windows xp sp2 image then i copied \i386 folder from the ERD image to the \i386 folder of the RIS image. In addition,i created a templates folder under the newly copied \i386 folder and i added these files in it : startrom.com , ntdetect.com , ristndrd.sif , winnt.sif and setupldr.exe which later i renamed it to ntldr and these files was took from a folder called OSChooser. so my folders structure for RIS deployment looks like this :

\\RemoteInstall\Setup\English\Images\ERD\i386\temp lates

My dhcp server is the same as RIS server so i had to add an 060 scope option with pxeclient value string in addition to 066,067 and 043 options.

However,when i turned on one of my client machines it booted successfully from the network and received an ip address. it also detected my tftp server for downloading the image and i saw a statement states " Setup is inspecting your computer's hardware configuration" and suddenly its stopped for a while then a Ntdetect failed message appeared. I checked the tftp log file results and i found "Timeout error sending ntdetect.com , 0 bytes". i felt that ntdetect.com file is corrupted. Anyways, i found another one in windows xp cd and i copied and pasted it in the tftp root directory but the problem still persist.

Please i am requesting help in this issue as well as any new ideas.

A friendly tip : you can use startrom.n12 instead of startrom.com to avoid F12 prompting.

Thanks

Regards,

Ahmed

Edited September 24, 2005 by Ahmed-26

[Ahmed-26]

Hey,

Here is an update for what happened :

I removed the RIS image from the server and i created a new image from windows 2000 server CD and i did all the steps that i discussed above.

Guess What happened!

I have now in the top of the screen statement "OSChooser V5.2" and i thought that was a progress for what i was doing but this screen stops for a while and a blue screen appeared and it stopped also forever. I invastigated the TFTP log file and i found that it tried to send OSChoose\i386\winnt.sif but it seems that the file need some additional parameters or something like that.

Any ideas?!!

Regards,

Ahmed

Edited September 24, 2005 by Ahmed-26

[getwired]

The backing image you use whenever you are RIS booting WinPE MUST be from the same version of Windows as the WinPE build. In the case of ERD, that would require anRISetup image of Windows Server 2003, Standard Edition.