Anyone Got Experience With A Pxe?

[shadowx 0]

Ok, at work we have all the computers booting into a PXE (Pre eXecution Environment) which we use for imaging the machines and such, sort of like a mini OS that is capable of basic functions like formatting hard drives, downloading and then applying image files to the drives and such like. It works fine. However, it has a strange bug....We have two preboot servers which have the boot instructions and what not for the machines, one for the linux machines which are sadly very few, and one for the windows machines, by default every PXE (because the PXE is on the network card/BIOS and not part of the OS) goes to the linux server 10.5 first, then when it realizes it has windows it is sent to the windows server 10.6 but if a USB flash drive is plugged in it will hang at the 10.5 server and never get redirected to the 10.6 and hence it wont boot, it will sit at the PXE bios screen all year. The solution is simple, take the drive out, restart and bingo, or exit the PXE with the escape key before it starts. However, users arent that smart and it means i have to get up and go to their machine to do it, and im lazy. Hence the problem :(So does anyone know why this happens or a possible fix? The only thing i can think of is that the server is mis-identifying the data on the flash drive for linux data somehow (im thinking perhaps open office files? or scratch, as we use these here and i believe they were originally linux based) and trying to boot from the linux server fails and just hangs. OR the boot server is trying to make it boot from the USB drive and failing silently. Any ideas?

[Idolon 0]

I don't have any experience with PXE, but you could check if the computer's BIOS has an option to enable/disable booting from USB. ?Though, if it does and disabling it fixes the problem, you'd have to go through every single computer... You could also just tape a sign to each computer saying, "If it doesn't boot, take out your flash drive and try again."?

[shadowx 0]

I don't have any experience with PXE, but you could check if the computer's BIOS has an option to enable/disable booting from USB.  Though, if it does and disabling it fixes the problem, you'd have to go through every single computer...
You could also just tape a sign to each computer saying, "If it doesn't boot, take out your flash drive and try again." 

Aye, already checked the boot from USB thingy on a spare machine i have here, no luck!

I think its going to come down to sending out an email!! Disturbed my morning cup of tea and forum time this morning :angel: HAd to actually do something!!!

Cant find any mention of it on the net so im just assuming the boot server is mis-identifying the primary boot device (hard drive) and assuming the USB drive is the one to use.

[Idolon 0]

On my Dell BIOS, you can modify the order of devices to boot from. ?USB wouldn't happen to be near the top of the priority list would it?

[shadowx 0]

Nopes, USB isnt on the list at all as i disabled USB booting.I think i shall have to dig deeper into the PXE and exactly how it works to find a solution.