Optiplex 960 seems to take forever to boot to PXE

[etruscan]

I am currently building our sccm 2007 r2 environment from scratch and have run into a problem where Dell Optiplex 960 machines are taking a very long time to boot to WINPE through PXE. I've successfully deployed images to several other models of computers (motion c5, lenovo m57p, dell optiplex 745) without trouble. Can someone point me in the right direction as to how to troubleshoot this? I've tried fiddling with the SATA settings, but this doesn't help.

 

server environment:

sccm 2007 r2 running on Server 2008(x64)sp1

[anyweb]

have you added vista network drivers to your boot.wim images for the optiplex 960 ?

[etruscan]

I have, and I assume they are loading properly because my task sequence begins (eventually). I found some forums suggesting that there are issues with this driver and winpe, but those people couldn't get winpe to load the driver at all, so I don't think that this is my issue.

[Peter van der Woude]

Does the smsts.log say anything about it?

[etruscan]

Sorry I haven't been on top of this, a rogue system admin thought it would be a nice surprise to update our SCCM to the sp2 release candidate and now I can't get anything to work, so the optiplex 960 problem is now the least of my worries. Thanks for the responses and thanks to any web for creating this great site.

[anyweb]

checkout this post from Ronnie, it might help you

 

http://scug.dk/blogs/configurationmanager/archive/2009/09/03/upgrading-configmgr-2007-sp2-beta-to-rc.aspx

 

cheers

 

niall

[etruscan]

Thanks, that post helped a little. For anyone else who had problems after upgrading to sp2 RC:

 

You have to uninstall waik 1.1, install (or reinstall sp2 RC) and then install WAIK for Windows 7.

 

I also had to reinstall IIS and everything that was depending on it, I used these instructions to do so: http://blogs.technet.com/configurationmgr/archive/2009/08/12/configmgr-2007-how-to-properly-reinstall-iis-in-windows-server-2008-on-an-sccm-2007-site-system.aspx

 

worked great.

 

As far as the optiplex 960 error, I determined that it was actually a problem with my test computer, not my environment. It's always the easiest solutions that you overlook.

[jeaostro]

Hello

 

Will it be possible to update from the SP2 RC to SP2 RTM?

Is the RC stable enough to use in a live environment? We would really like to start deploying Windows 7 computers with SCCM.

 

Best Regards.

Jean André

[anyweb]

it may be possible by uninstalling the WAIK, reboot and doing the SP2 install, however Microsoft have explicitly stated that they will not support production systems that have been upgraded from beta or RC to SP2

 

so keep the RC in your lab unless you are a TAP customer

 

cheers

 

niall

[jeaostro]

Will it be possible to remove the RC of SP2, then install the RTM of SP2 when it is released?

Or will the removal of RC SP2 also remove the SCCM Site?

[anyweb]

you can't remove it (well you can but then bye bye site...), but you can do what I already said above