ZfD4 Imaging - PXE on new machines 1

[OMaraSTO]

HELP!!!
I'm so frustrated at the moment trying to get a way for imaging to work!!!
I've got a batch of 10 brand new PCs (DELL Optiplex GX260), I've spent all day configuring the first one perfectly ready to take an image of it and push that on to the other 9, simple right?
Wrong!
Dell BIOS doesn't seem to have the option to turn on Network boot for PXE. Not a problem I thought, a little known Dell trick to force a network boot attempt is to hit F3 during startup. It says its attempting network boot, then carries on to load Windows.
Next thought was to try and create a PXE floppy disk, these have worked a treat in the past. But uh-oh, these Dells have Intel Pro/1000 MT network adapters - there certainly isn't any of them in the PXE disk driver list!
Next I tried the Intel site, downloaded what I think are the Linux drivers for a pro/1000 MT, and tried to create a Zen boot CD, though I struggle with this process and keep getting CDs that aren't recognised as bootable (although they are finalised), so that wasted 5 CDs before I gave up.
I've downloaded the Intel boot manager utils, booted the machine into DOS, fired them up, only to be told that the boot order option is locked by the BIOS!
AAAAAAAAAAAArrghhhh!!!!
Anybody any ideas of how I can get this working please?
Or if anyone can provide dummy-proof instructions on creating a good boot CD with the correct drivers, for someone who really doesn't understand Linux.
Thanks in advance
Steve

 

[OMaraSTO]

Eventually figured out how to switch on the PXE in the DELL BIOS.
On this batch, under the 'Integrated Devices' menu there is a Network Controller, the options for it are 'On', 'Off', and 'On w/PXE'
Big congratulations go to DELL for hiding it so very well

 

[ITinKC]

Thanks so much for the answer in this post. I have 750 new GX260's to deploy in the next two weeks!

 

[OMaraSTO]

No problem, and good luck with the 750 Dells.
I don't think Novell do much testing on Dell machines, which is a shame because they're all our company will buy. Zenworks works a treat with GX260s running windows XP, but to this day I can't get all the Zenworks stuff to run on windows 2000 Dells (I can have remote control, or application launcher depending on which agent I use, but never both!)
Another little known Dell trick you may find handy - after you've switched PXE on in the BIOS, you can force a manual network boot by hitting the F3 key at the Dell logo screen at startup - this lets you easily image them without adding the extra 30secs to the bootup time for each machine that you would get usually if you added the network into the default boot order in BIOS.

Steve

 

[jimfixit]

So, did you finally get this to go okay? And, may I ask how you got the multicast default image to go to your new, out of the box, Dells? We just bought a bunch of GX270's. I want to do exactly what you described. I have PXE working if I associate the workstation to the image and choose to push it down. But that means I have to install the station and login with it to create workstation object...not what I want to do...thanks.

 

[PakiTerr0r]

Hello ALL ....

i had similar problem myself with the new Dell Precision 360s that came with Intel Pro 1000 MT cards...
i wasn't able to image that machine with Norton Ghost nor Acronis True Image 6. I updated the drivers and nothing, updated bios to the latest version and i was only able to image it with ghost but still no luck with Acronis. I also tried enabling PXE but no help there as well. But after all this i got an error message which indicated something about Dual Processers( can't remember the exact message ) so i went and ENABLED "HyperThreading" since these 360s are HT machines. and after that everything works fine, even the machines that i have not touched ( no new drivers, no new bios ). Hope this helps...

 

[OMaraSTO]

[jimfixit]:
Yes i've got it running to image all of our new PCs we're getting, which are GX260s.
To be honest, I'm still only in the early stages of getting Zenworks setup, so at the moment I only have the one image for these new PCs, and the multicast policy I've simply setup to push that image to any unregistered workstations without any conditions. This works well for us, because even if there are PCs out there that are not registered in Zen, they don't try to pull down the image because as I say I use the F3 key to manually do the network boot, rather than have it on by default.