Sorry, just to clarify: - Are you saying that you want the PXE/Automation Menu that pops up when a client PXE boots to have no timeout or something different?

I think you are confusing DS and NS. DS uses AClient. NS uses the Altiris Agent and has nothing to do with imaging clients.

You might want to clarify exactly what you are wanting to do.

Basicly what I want to do is be able to deploy an image to a just delivered PC, via the deployment server.



I will need to place the new pc onto the network first but here is my question. Do I need to have the altiris agent and deployment agent installed before I can do a image deployment. Or is there another way (not manually booting from the cliient machine vie pxe or a boot disk.



Sorry I wasn't more descriptive.

Hello

Which pre boot operation system do you use?You can boot via PXE.

Regards

You would need to have a PXE server setup and configured in your environment. You will also need to select a Pre-Boot OS to use, (i.e. DOS, Linux, WinPE)



Once you have that setup you will want to go into the PXE Config Manager and under the "DS" tab put a check mark in the box that says, "Enable response to request from computers not in the DS Database." Then select a "Boot option for Unknown Computer" which would be your pre-boot OS of choice.



From there you can either choose for the client to wait indefinitely, meaning a user at the client side will have to pick a pre-boot OS to boot to or you can select the item which gives the user a specified amount of time to choose the pre-boot OS. If they don't select one within the specified amount of time, the machine will boot to the pre-boot OS you selected in the "Pre-boot OS for Unknown Computers."



From there, the machine should boot into that Pre-Boot OS and eventually come to a screen which states something to the effect of, "Bootworks has been instructed to wait". (Those may not be the exact words, I forget what it actually says.)



Once you receive that message you should see the client in your DS Console under the "New Computers" group with a yellow triangle over it's icon.



The one thing I did forget to mention is that you need to ensure the your client is set to boot to the NIC first before all other devices. You can change this option in the Client's BIOS settings.



Hopefully this was what you were looking for or helped in someway,

Thanks for your help, I have got PXE working via macaddress. Next question i suppose is: How do I automaticly add the just newly imaged and sysprepped pc onto our domain.



I have tried using a run script entry in the job after the deployment entry. It doesnt seem to do anything, though the script works on a pc normally.



Any ideas or is there a better more simply way?



Thanks for your time.

One fairly simple and straightforward method would be to have the computer join the domain when it runs sysprep mini-setup after your image has been deployed. To do this, open up the Sysprep answer file which you use in your Distribute Disk Image job and add the following lines under the "[Identification]" tag:



[Identification]

JoinDomain=YourDomainName

DomainAdmin=Altiris

DomainAdminPassword=altiris



The items in italic will need to be changed to reflect your own environment.



Another simple method to join a machine to the domain would be to right click on the the machine in the DS Console, click on "Configure", select the "Microsoft Networking" icon on the left hand side, select the button that says "Domain", and type in your domain name in the provided field.



Hope this helps.

I am currently not using an answer file, I gather there is an easy way to generate an answer file for me to manipulate?



Thanks for your response.