Baremetal PXE Imaging with NVMe drives

Usage and Config OSD
1

We are having an issue with our new Lenovo Thinkpad P70 laptops and use PXE to image them. These new laptops come with a M.2 NVMe style SSD instead of the normal SATA SSD drives in them. Everything PXE boots correctly and WinPE is downloaded and runs but when after naming the computer it pops up that the “disk is not accessible” so PE is not seeing the drive…

I was told by Lenovo to inject a Windows Update (KB2990941) into my boot.wim so PE can see the drive and I would probably also need to do this in my WIndows 7 image as well so the OS can see the drive properly…

Has anybody else had any experience with this? I know how to bind drivers to the OS and WinPE but I’ve never had to inject a MSU file into my boot.wim… I see documentation online but is there anything written up for Bigfix to do this?

1 Like
2

Look at how to do this with MDT, which is what BigFix uses under the hood I believe.

I think the Windows AIK is also relevant, which is what MDT is built on top of.

3

Hi, we don’t have direct experience with this specific case.
You can, tough, patch the boot.wim of winpe using the Microsoft tools (dism/imagex) before importing the MDTBundle into BigFix.

Hope this helps

4

From the start with out of box systems, have seen that they ship configured for UEFI boot and attempting to boot from standard WinPE disk will not properly recognize the drive. Check the BIOS, try and reconfigure for legacy boot mode, be aware you may have to make a couple other setting in BIOS depending on the OEM requirements. Changing boot from UEFI to legacy will wipe the UEFI boot ability.

5

Thanks for the suggestions, I tried many things to get this working. I stumbled upon some actual NVMe drivers and attached them to WinPE 5 for that specific model but still no go… The system has to be configured as UEFI instead of Legacy in this case otherwise the OS will not be able to see the drive at all… I’ve still got this test unit but we called Lenovo and had them change the remaining systems to standard SATA SSD drives instead since they hadn’t shipped yet.

I’m not sure how long it will take for the M.2 NVMe drives to become a standard or if they will at all but we need an easier way to work with these new drives.

6

Have also wondered about this too with move to M.2 NVMe drives and path towards newer hardware. We are a Dell shop and do suspect that same problem will arise.