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Christian Saborío's Blog

The blog deals mostly with problems and their respective solutions that I find on day to day basis at my current workplace. Most of the issues so far deal specifically with Virtualization (mostly Microsoft related), 64-bit migration, and Windows 2003 issues. Many of the problems I have faced in various projects have been solved by reading someone else's blog. This is an effort to pay back and hopefully someone will be able to solve some of their problems by reading something within these pages.

How to get a machine to use a specific pxeboot file with WDS?

We are racing against time to get an application ready that needs to deploy images with WDS and Active Directory.  This is the latest problem I have encountered:

Ok, so based on this article (http://technet2.microsoft.com/windowsserver/en/library/383538a3-4129-4205-b363-d36b08e22ca81033.mspx?mfr=true) , when using WDS and having the machine boot, you can bypass the F12 keypress by replacing pxeboot.ini by pxeboot.n12.  This works like a charm, all machines that boot into the PXE server bypass the F12 key.   However, I would like to specify which machines should boot fron pxeboot.com and pxeboot.n12.   I generated an Excel sheet that has the info required to prestage the client on the AD.  This is what I have entered on the 4th row:

SERVER01   GUID    Location....  \\wds_server_name\reminst\Boot\x86\pxeboot.n12

This pre-stages the machine on AD and based on what I have read, will point the machine (identified by its GUID to boot from the pxeboot.n12 file).

I have used the script called "PrestagRISCInt.vbs" (found here: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=aaf0a7a4-71c1-4ee9-b974-66214651a23b&displaylang=en) and issued the following command:

cscript /InputFile:C:\Foo.xls /Server:hpc-dc

After a short wait, I get the following message: "Success creating new computer accounts in Active Directory based on UUIDs!"

When I boot tha machine, it still requests F12 to be pressed, which means that it is STILL using pxeboot.com to boot.  

I have followed all the instructions carefully, any idea on what the problem might be? 
Published May 01 2007, 08:36 PM by Csaborio
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Comments

 

Jaguilar said:

Finally did it: http://blogs.artinsoft.net/jose_aguilar_blog/archive/2007/05/16/1442.aspx
May 17, 2007 10:43 AM
 

Jaguilar said:

Found out how to do it.
You need to use wdsutil and pass in the boot file of the device.

I blogged about it here: http://blogs.artinsoft.net/jose_aguilar_blog/archive/2007/05/16/1442.aspx
May 24, 2007 3:14 PM

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