OSD - Computer can't pxe boot, and network boot media didn't work

Hello all - been lurking on this forum here for a couple of months. It’s been an excellent resource for learning BigFix. While I have some experience with Microsoft Deployment Toolkit, I have been having a lot of troubles getting the OSD module to play nicely.

I am having a problem imaging a system, I was curious if anyone had any ideas that could help me out?

The make and model I am trying to image is an HP RP5700. It’s probably ~6 years old. I threw the BigFix agent onto the machine and let the console absorb computer information to get it into our environment. It already had some drivers available from another model I’ve successfully setup and imaged (Rp5800), I downloaded the missing drivers and bound them. I didn’t import the network driver, as it claimed the RP5800 used the same hardware ID already and the driver was already present.

When I go to PXE boot this system, I get an error stating there is not enough freebase memory to load the boot image. The boot image itself is only 600kb, alas… this NIC doesn’t seem capable of loading that large of an image, which is still pretty small.

As a work around (since I am unclear on how I could resolve that), I generated network deployment media to a USB stick. While doing so, I injected all available drivers, as I assume it will need these in order to boot into the pxe server properly. Is that accurate?

It seems to boot off of the USB stick just fine. In the CMD window, it appears to be checking for drivers. it installs a number of them, and fails on a number of them with ‘error 3’. in case it’s relevant, here’s the succeed and fail list:

succeeds list: k57nd60a.inf (this appears to be a broadcom driver, I assume the network driver), iaAHCIC.inf (intel ahci), b57nd60a.inf (another broadcom netextreme), iaAHCIC.inf (intel ahci again)

fails list: b57nb60a.inf (the same driver that later succeeds on a different line, fails earlier in the message spam…),iaStoreAC.inf (intel storage)

when using boot media directed to automatically detect the PXE server address, it gets past the driver screen and goes to the Tivoli screen, tries to connect to 0.0.0.0 and times out after 10 seconds and restarts. this leads me to believe there’s an issue with the network driver, but I am speculating.

I regenerated the boot media specifying the IP address directly, as something to try, and now after the driver screen, the Tivoli screen comes up, but it never tries anything. After about 2 minutes, it brings up a startnet.cmd window that flashes by for 2 seconds and then restarts. It looks like it displays:

"Machine information have been properly exported. you can now go into the TPM for OS deployment web console to register this machine. W USB found on D. Need to remap d: on p:. need to remap f: on q:. command exited successfully

… then it loads disk part. could not find x:\current.bat. ‘x:\rbagent.exe’ is not recnognized as an internal or external command, operable program or batch file."

If anyone has any insight or suggestions, I am all ears. Thanks in advance!

while digging around for logs and not finding any, I noticed on my USB boot disk that it’s generating a newhost config file each time I try to boot off of it. inside of the config, the pxe server is showing as 0.0.0.0 still ignoring the IP that I input during the generation of the deployment media.

Is there any logging that may prove useful? the bigfix console itself doesn’t show anything in the activity history, since it’s not getting far enough to communicate with it.

Hi,
“include all available WinPE drivers” in the media is useful when you have a new computer model which is not listed among the available models in the Driver Library, and a binding grid cannot be generated to associate the correct drivers for the
devices. Since you have your model in the model list, I suggest to check again its matrix for WinPE version you want to include in the network boot media and create it without selecting “inject all drivers”.
If the problem is related to conflicting drivers, applicable for the same device present on the target computer, that you have in your driver library, this should solve.
Thanks.

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I also faced the issue, but got a workaround I didn’t selected all the WInPE drivers only x64 bit as my OS is 64 Bit and it worked with Network boot media.

to follow up, the resolution to this ended up being to uncheck ‘inject all drivers’ as suggested. Thanks!

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