Deployment Solution

This is a tower version of the Dell 780 and when trying to boot up to pxe it will not find the dhcp server. If I then plug into a Netgear switch that is plugged into the same Cisco building switch it kicks right up. Any ideas? this is version 6.9 sp5

Have a look to:

http://www.symantec.com/connect/articles/configuring-router-pxe

http://www.symantec.com/business/support/index?page=content&id=HOWTO1071

matteo

There was a similar thread on here not too long ago where POE on the switch was causing problems with certain machines.  Not sure if a new BIOS was released to fix this or not.  But that is where I would start, verify that the BIOS is the latest.

We do not use POE. We are able to image using WinPE but only with an external switch attached to the network and to disable the C States Control in the bios on these particular big tower Dell 780s. The smaller Dell 780s work fine. I wonder if the regular Cisco switch is treating it as a foe? You know how they do that friend or foe thing for about 45 seconds when a computer is turned on.

You may not be utilizing it, but it could be turned on.  I would still verify that you are at the latest BIOS for that machine.

Depending on your Cisco security, it is possible, however, one would think that connecting it to another switch, connected to the Cisco switches would aggravate the problem rather than fix it, if that was the case.

Have you tried enabling PortFast on the switch port?  The default setting for Cisco switches is to disable PortFast.  Sounds as though the PC is finishing its PXE search before the Cisco switch has had a chance to turn on the port.