Booting wds without wimboot

[chmeyer]

Hello there,

I'm responsible for keeping some Clients running without beeing a "real" admin. Usually I'm just (re-)installing the clients via PXE (LAN-card with bootROM). Configuration and installing additional software to the clients is done by paid admins over the internet.
Some of the bootROMs in my machines seems to be broken so that I thought I could (re)install the clients with a iPXE-CD.

The local Windows Server (DC, DHCP, TFTP, ...) is 2008, PXE-boot is with WDS.
Booting the iPXE-CD works fine, dhcp and loading of wdsnbp.com works out of the box, too.
But: TFTP download of pxeboot.n12 seems to start several times and fails in the end.

I don't know what the problem of this failure is. I tried via commandline but failed, too.
Is there a way to work around the problem?
Your most recommended installation method for this case is the use of wimboot. This sadly is not possible in my case since I do not have write access to the Windows server.

But I think there should be a way lo load boot.sdi or boot.wim directly with iPXE so that iPXE can replace the broken or missing bootROMs of my network cards, but I didn't find a solution (without wimboot) so far.

Thanks for any ideas
Christian