Missing Computer, but exists somewhere? How do I get rid of it?

[Ocelaris]

Hi, I can't seem to find a computer in SCCM anywhere. I usually can find it in one of my collections, whether Win 7 machines or All systems; but this is an XP machine, and I've looked through almost every collection (we have hundreds). I know it exists in the system because I have a query which I enter the MAC address, and it spits out the hostname and GUID. Also particularly it doesn't boot into PXE because we can't find it to delete and readd out of SCCM. I've found when we have problems with the computer's entry in SCCM, (i.e. duplicates) it will not PXE boot, and the only solution is to find it, delete it, and readd it. But we can't seem to find it anywhere?

 

I've wondered this for a long time, how do you go about really really deleting some machine if you can't find it, is there some way to clean it out forcefully, maybe a SQL query or something on the back end?

[Peter33]

Have you tried to create a custom collection querying for the mac address?

[Ocelaris]

oh... shoot, that's a good idea! I have a query, but I can't do anything with the results (i.e. delete), but making a custom collection would work... Thanks!

[Ocelaris]

That worked great, I just did a Criterion of Simple Value, then Network Adapter, and Mac Address, and my machine came right up. Strange how systems disappear out of collections, you would think that it would at least be in "All systems" but when the client is messed up, I've seen it not be in that group.

[Jorgen Nilsson]

There are two great builtin reports I normally use when troubleshooting PXE boot for instance:

"MAC - Computers for a specific MAC address"

"Computers with duplicate MAC addresses"

Regards,

Jörgen