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When you PXE boot a surface pro device using a USB dongle it will be successful on the very first machine but subsequently it will fail to PXE boot the other machines

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Scenario:

  • You are using a USB dongle to PXE boot a surface pro machine(surface pro 1/2/3)

  • You have advertise a Task sequence to an unknown machine.

     

    Issue:

    The first surface pro device will PXE boot and complete the task sequence without any problem but when you use the same USB dongle to PXE boot other surface pro device it will not do a PXE.

     

    Cause:

    This happens because the first time when you PXE boot the device the MAC address of the USB dongle is recorded in the database. So when you use the same USB dongle on a different machine it finds that the machine is known and as we have advertise the task sequence only to unknown machine collection so the device doesn’t finds any advertisement targeted to it and will fails to PXE.

     

    Solution:

    Basically we can follow three approach based on our requirement.

     

  1. Use a separate USB dongle each time we PXE boot a surface pro device. Which will not be economical as we will need 100 USB dongle if we have 100 surface pro device and moreover, the dongle is of no use once we have the OS installed.

  2. Once the device is PXE booted and the OS is installed we can run the following query to find the device in the database.

    Select

          v_R_System.Netbios_Name0, SYS.User_Name0,

          v_RA_System_MACAddresses.MAC_Addresses0

    from

        v_R_System, v_R_System SYS, v_RA_System_MACaddresses,

        v_fullcollectionmembership

    where

        v_ra_system_macaddresses.resourceid=v_r_system.resourceid

        and v_fullcollectionmembership.resourceid=v_ra_system_macaddresses.resourceid

        and SYS.resourceid=v_r_system.resourceid AND MAC_Addresses0 = '00:15:5D:5B:9A:44'

     

    (Replace the MAC address with the MAC address of your device)

     

    Once you find the device in the database delete the entry from the database. It will be a tedious task to find the tables associated with that particular MAC address.

     

  3. We can also try to delete the machine from the console which should also work in most of the case.

     

  4. We can create a “Test collect” and import the USB dongle using the MAC address into the Test collection. Then deploy the Task Sequence to this test collection. This is the most simple of all the above and also easy to implement.

 

 

Happy PXE booting!!

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