PXE boot 1,000 new machines and auto-image - Without Paying DELL for Custom Shipped Boot Settings?
We can make an entire subnet (school) upon PXE boot to go into a specific RSA/PXE environment, and then image automatically from what I can see in the K2000 box. It would be any machine in the school, but since it'll be Summer, we aren't worried about people being there with machines causing problems.
My question is - if PXE boot is not enabled by default on the BIOS - there really isn't any way to enable that or force a one time PXE boot on these machines, without having to go into the BIOS on each one manually and enabling PXE boot, is there?
So, the the TLDR type:
-New machines from Dell. They can't tell us default boot options. We need PXE boot to auto-image via K2000. Any way of forcing PXE boot without manually enabling PXE/NIC boot in BIOS one-by-one?
Answers (5)
Comments:
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We had to do the same thing on Vostro 230s and 260s - andibogard 12 years ago
You could create a CCTK enabled boot CD, Mount the iso and extract the boot.wim from it. Mount the boot.wim file and modify the startnet.cmd to issue cctk command lines changes that sets the bios how you want and also sets the boot order as network first. At the end of the startnetcmd run wpeutil /restart if you want the computers to autorestart and start imaging immediatly after running the CD's. Commit the changes to the wim file, dismount the wim file and replace the one in the boot cd iso file with that one. make many cd's and boot away. when you pxeboot have a cctk enables environment and issue a cctk command to change the boot order back to HDD first.
for example:
x:\cctk\x86\cctk.exe bootorder --sequence=hdd.1,hdd.2,embnic,usbdev,cdrom --valsetuppwd=Password if you have one on bios.