Deployment Solution

Hi all,

     I have a DS6.9 SP6 setup on Server 2008 R2 Enterprise and using WinPE4.0.  The install is between a year and two old.  The DB is local, on the machine, running on SQL 2005.  Recently been having issues of clients, that have been connected fine for over a year, WinPE booting as though DS doesn't recognize the client.  The clients are still in DS, but none-the-less, they're PXE booting to WinPE.  

     Whether it's somehow related or not...we're also seeing an issue during imagine (rdeploy) where while we've imaged all of our current models before, without an issue...now we're seeing "Retrying DHCP server"...first on our Latitude 3470's (which worked fine at one point) and now it's happening on other models that we've imaged without an issue in the past.  

    If anyone has any input it would be greatly appreciated.  This is actually one of three installations we're running.  School district with 3 campuses...each campus is running its own install...2 campuses on the above mentioned versions and 1 campus running DS6.9 SP4 with WinPE2.1 (because I haven't gotten around to building a new server there yet).  The other campus running a similar setup as above has a few minor hiccups here and there, but not nearly as many issues...I built both servers (all 3 actually, but).

Thanks very much

Rick Bond

First I would start by running health-check to DB From

https://support.symantec.com/en_US/article.HOWTO9089.html

The Retry DHCp is a "funny one" as once driver is added to bootwiz it should be included in every PE build you create or re-create after that.

Might want to check the Bootwiz custom driver folder if we still have that driver there.

The other WinPe issues might point to a problem with the PE itself, missing WMI package for example.

Missing WMI package and missing drivers might then include to a problem creating the PE WIm file on the main server, one of know problem causer there is AV that can block dism commands (we use dism commands while creating pe WIM file to inject the packages and drivers)

Thanks very much for the information.  I'll start with the DB health check.  Appreciate your time and will respond when I've checked it out.

Bond,

All clients should boot up into automation when pxe booting depending on your pxe configuration settings. 

Unknown To Console : Clients that are not known to the console should boot to automation and then start the initial deployment task.

Known To Console: Clients that are known should boot to automation (depending on pxe settings) but then restart once the dagent connects and realizes that there is no task waiting for it.

Unchecking "Enable response to request from computers not in the GSS database" will make it so no unknown machines can boot to pxe.

DHCP retry most always refers to a missing driver, the interesting thing is you said these worked in the past... that would lead me to believe either the drivers are no longer in the boot disc or possibly the bios was updated on these machines changes the behavior for the NIC.

Locating the correct network drivers for your client PC on Ghost Solution Suite 
https://support.symantec.com/en_US/article.HOWTO124400.html

How To Add Drivers To Ghost Solution Suite
https://support.symantec.com/en_US/article.HOWTO124704.html