Prec. 670 and Windows 2003 RIS Server

Did you get anywhere in solving this issue?

This issue has not been resolved by a call to Dell support or anywhere else. In fact, the new GX280s are now exhibiting the same problem. It seems that Dell and Intel are providing us with an unsupportable NIC for PXE environments

I have had some luck with the Marvell Yukon card since getting ahold of Windows PE 2005 (I was previously using Windows PE 1.2), and using the drvinst.exe utility to inject the additional drivers (version 8.27.4.3).

HOW-TO Marvell Yukon with Windows PE RIS:


Create Windows PE 2005 image (I based mine off Windows XP SP2), and use the drvinst.exe utility to inject the Yukon drivers. E.g. Put the .cat, .sys & .inf in an empty directory and run drvinst.exe:

D:\> DRVINST.EXE /INF:D:\WINPE\DRIVERS\INTEL\PRO100;D:\WINPE\DRIVERS\INTEL\PRO10
00;D:\WINPE\DRIVERS\MARVELL /inject:D:\WINPE\WINPE_XPSP2

(I also inserted drivers for the Intel Pro 100 VM and Pro 1000 cards)

This places the .sys in i386\system32\drivers and the .inf in i386\inf, while also updating the support files to note the drivers existence.

Now create a standard Windows XP SP2 RIS installation point, then copy the contents of your Windows PE XP SP2 image over it (overwriting files as necessary). Stop the binlsvc and put additional copies of the .inf, .sys and .cat in the i386 directory before restart binlsvc service.

You should have a bootable (and further tweakable) Windows PE working with RIS.

Hope this helps someone else,
Robin

OP:  I've got the same thing on a Dell GX520 (Broadcom NIC, SATA HDD):

Boot via RIS into WinPE, goes thru all RIS login steps and starts to boot PE and stops at "Please wait..." prompts.  I've replaced the NIC with an Intel 10/100 NIC and using RBFG.exe to build a boot floppy; the same thing happens, so I know this isn't a network card issue - there's some other reason this won't boot. 

It's holding up a Dell deployment - can't deploy any Dells until this gets fixed.  :(  All of my previous Dells (GX280, GX270, GX260, etc.) work fine.  I'm using the appropriate NIC for the GX520 - Broadcom NIC drivers from 4/1/05 - tried 8.22 and 8.27, too, in winpe\system32\drivers. 

Anyone else? 

Solution found:

http://forums.us.dell.com/supportforums/board/message?board.id=pes_win2003&message.id=983

 

Basically, get MS hotfix http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;814199 and apply it, and all is well. 

Agreed - that will fix the problem. But is that really what you want? I'd want my users to be able to use HT - and once dual cores get here, you won't have that option anymore. The hotfix (or the ACPI text changes in ristndrd.sif) will resolve the issue without requiring workstation feature removal/changes.

We found a fix for our situation, and that is to disable hyperthreading in the BIOS all works well.

You're right - disabling hyperthreading is not an optimal solution. We were just happy to FIND a solution, any solution, so we could move forward.

I will try the hotfix and post my results to this forum. Thanks for the update!

The hotfix from KB814199 does allow us to keep hyperthreading enabled when imaging the machine.

Thanks to all for the comments - I consider this issue resolved.

Glad it worked for you - I just found the solution by doing a few google searches, and then looking a little more here.