[SOLVED] RE: iPXE & WDS [Prestaged: false]

[BAUR-ITCS]

Hi, funny, I just ran into the same problem today.

What solved it for me was performing the steps listed under "If you are using WDS without SCCM 2007" at
http://windowsdeployments.net/how-to-spe...-and-sccm/ :

On the WDS server find the file default.bcd in the \REMOTEINSTALL\Boot\x86 folder (This was the folder you setup when you configured WDS)
Copy default.bcd from the \REMOTEINSTALL\Boot\x86 folder to the local C:\ drive
Then from a command line type: Bcdedit -store c:\default.bcd -set {68d9e51c-a129-4ee1-9725-2ab00a957daf} ramdisktftpblocksize 16384
Make a copy of the original \REMOTEINSTALL\Boot\x86\default.bcd file by changing the extension to default.bcd.backup
Copy the c:\default.bcd back to it’s original location at \REMOTEINSTALL\Boot\x86
Now repeat steps 1 thru 5 for the \REMOTEINSTALL\Boot\amd64\default.bcd
Then on the WDSServer from a command prompt type: Sc control wdsserver 129

Though for good measure, I manually stopped and started the WDSServer in addition to that.

In short, the client doesn't *stop* at the TFTP boot stage for pxeboot.n12, it just becomes incredibly slow due to a wrong tftp packet size. I saw that as the NIC activity indicator kept flashing although there was no other traffic to be expected on the network I was testing it on.

Currently, I'm using the following parameters to boot in addition to applying the above fix:
dhcp ; set 252:string \Boot\BCD ; imgexec tftp://${next-server}/Boot\x86\wdsnbp.com

Note that there are ways to make this work with x86 and x64 by turning this into a script and changing it like this:

cpuid --ext 29 && set arch x64 || set arch x86
dhcp
set 252:string \Boot\BCD
imgexec tftp://${next-server}/Boot\${arch}\wdsnbp.com

I will now try if applying the patch above also allows for running ipxe without passing any parameters.

-Stefan