PXE boot and UEFI disk formatting on UEFI enabled devices

[GTI_Guy78]

Hi-

 

Just wanted to see if anyone's come across something similar to the issue I'm seeing. We were using USB boot media initially to deploy Windows 10 and everything was golden. But now, we are starting to implement PXE boot, the UEFI enabled computers are getting formatted as MBR. The smsts logs stating that "Property IsUEFI is now = False".

 

Checked the BIOS > UEFI enabled > Legacy Options Roms enabled > No secure boot

 

Any ideas? I wasn't the one who built the task sequence and the disk formatting options tab has the condition:

Variable:_SMSTSBootUEFI

Condition: equals

Value: true

 

I've even tried changing this to use WMI query:

 

Select * from Win32_ComputerSystem where Manufacturer like "%Dell%"

 

Still it fails to set partition the drive as GPT and subsequently ends up being MBR.

=========

tl:dr

>SCCM 2012 1606 deploying Windows 10

>Used USB boot media on UEFI enabled devices = ALL OK

> PXE boot same UEFI device

> Task sequences partitions drives to MBR

> No bootable devices found

> switch BIOS to MBR = Boots Ok

> WTF??!!

 

Thanks.

[mike.terrill]

So it sounds like you are still PXE booting with the legacy network stack. UEFI has a different network stack that you need to enable and boot from. Depending on the vendor, the setting is usually something like PXE Internal IPV4/IPV6 or IPV4NetworkStack. When you boot with this, you are booting the system in UEFI mode and ConfigMgr will reflect that by setting _SMSTSBootUEFI=True.

[spgsitsupport]

How about for test, do change the task sequence to have variable

 

_SMSTSBootUEFI=False

 

and disable (again for test time) MBR partitioning at all?

 

That should PXE legacy boot, but format drive GPT UEFI

[GTI_Guy78]

Thanks for the replies. @mike.terrill was correct, my boot options were set to legacy. After a few hours of troubleshooting I found a similar thread where the person had to set DHCP option 60 = PXEClient. After I had my network team set this up I switched on PXE Network stack and am now in UEFI heaven.

 

Solution:

2 things needed:

1- Option 60

2- Fully Enable PXE Networkstack in the bios. ( i had bios set up like a hybrid uefi...i guess?)

 

Thanks to everyone for the great advice.