Deployment Solution

I am trying to get win pe to image a computer but after it boots up it seams to keep restarting DHCP client service it will keep retrying over and over. Any idea what the issue is.

This happens when;

a) DHCP is actually down/broken... or ...

b) The PE disc doesn't have the appropriate network card driver.

Make sure that DHCP is handing out addresses. Try a release/renew on a working test system. If all is good there... make sure that in PXE Configuration, your PE image has the appropriate drivers loaded for the network card. Use the device manager's "Details" tab to get the vendor and device id of your target computer's network adapter and then ensure that it is in the list for the the PE disk.

I have the nic drivers. How do I go about adding them to the PE boot image or DOS boot image?

The process is the same for a NIC:
https://kb.altiris.com/article.asp?article=40799&p=1

For WinPE2 you use either Vista or 2008 drivers right? I've used Vista drivers for desktops/laptops but I need to add support for a server nic now too. Should I use 2008?

Vista, Windows Server 2008 and Windows 7 all use the same (new) driver model. Any one of the above should load fine. NOTE: When you load a new set of drivers, they do not show up straight away in the list... you need to click "Refresh" to see the number of drivers loaded increment. I use the option to include all drivers, and the option to compress the WIM image. Works a treat.

Murray,
I didn't know they were all using the same driver model. Thanks for the clarification.

Ok so I added the driver clicked refresh selected all drivers rebuilt the image. But it dose not appear to load any of the drivers in the past it would say loading driver then it would list them off insted it stops at loading drivers for a while then moves on. What did I miss?

That sounds perfect. That is what the new WinPE 2.1 disk does. It no longer lists the driver(s) it has loaded. Does it work now?

NOPE I even selected all of the drivers in the list. Should I click auto detect. I tried it both ways but it still keeps trying to retry. I was trying it at home with an evaluation version. At my work win PE 2.1 will say loading drivers then list them off as it loads the drivers.