Deployment Solution

Deployment Server 6.9 SP1 (MP1) was successfully installed and tested ok in the DEV environment. After a month or so when trying to PXE boot, the process would go in a continuous boot (loop).

On investigation of the Deployment console, PXE configuration Utility, we were unable to open the PXE configuration utility to check current settings.

An error message box kept on popping up and said that the PXE manager couldn't connect to the Deployment server and that the services might have stopped and need to be restarted.

First of all we restarted all the services related to the Deployment server and PXE, which brought no luck as we still had the same error as before.

Then a repair of Deployment Server and a reboot of the server was done and no luck with that either.

Finally we did the following in this order which resolved the problem we were experiencing:

1. Stopped Altiris PXE Manager and Altiris PXE Server services. Start, Run, Type: services.msc
2. Copied the pxemanager.ini file from the eXpress share, PXE folder, to another location. Outside of the PXE folder.
3. Then through Add/Remove Programs, uninstalled the PXE Manager installation and also uninstalled the PXE Server installation.
4. Then we proceeded to delete the PXE folder found in the eXpress share.
5. Next we opened the registry editor and removed all references to the PXE files on the server. Start, Run, Type: regedit
6. We then recreated the PXE folder in the eXpress share.
7. Navigated to the Deployment Server setup folder and executed the aexinstall.exe file and selected a custom setup from the menu provided. Followed through all the steps and left them at default and finished the installation.
   

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8. After the repair/installation was done and all files were replaced, we proceeded to copy the pxemanager.ini file back into the PXE folder in the eXpress share.
9. Finally we proceeded to open the Deployment Server console and could now enter into the PXE configuration Utility and our PXE jobs could now run without the continues boot loop cycle that it had previously gone through.