Imaging XPS 15 7590

@jcjcmoore  have you verified that you have network connectivity through that NIC?  If you're PXE booting, obviously you do, but you didn't specify whether you were doing that or booting your WinPE environment from a flash drive.  Are you using any sort of MAC Address-based access anywhere?  Some Dell systems when used with some Dell dock and USB NICs support MAC Address Passthrough, where the system overrides the MAC address built into the "external" NIC with either a MAC address built into the system specifically for this purpose or optionally (where applicable), the MAC address of the system's own onboard NIC.  So if you've got the built-in MAC of that USB NIC whitelisted somewhere, that might not be the MAC that it's using while connected to that system.

On a side note, you shouldn't need to disable Secure Boot if your boot environment is built from WinPE 4 or newer (Windows 8 kernel or newer).  You can save some time there.  At the very least, I'd recommend enabling it afterward because it's a nice anti-rootkit mechanism to have available.

I am indeed PXE booting and the adapter shows all three lights. i get a red power light, a green light and a blinking blue light showing I have a connectivity. I saw the MAC address pass-through but did not enable it. I will give that a try and see if it helps.

The reason I am turning secure boot off is because when it is enabled the screen goes blank after the flash screen. The computer is still running but I have no video. Not sure what is going there either to be honest. 

Actually I just realized that PXE booting doesn’t necessarily mean you have network connectivity in the WinPE environment that loads, because during the PXE boot process, the NIC driver embedded into the system firmware is being used, but after the WinPE OS loads, it takes over hardware control. So if you don’t have the correct driver for that adapter in your boot image, you would not have network connectivity anymore, and I don’t know if link lights necessarily mean a driver is loaded. (Side note: There’s a similar quirk that applies to USB 3.0. When people booted Windows 7 installation media from a flash drive connected to a USB 3.0 port, they found that the boot process worked fine, but then Windows Setup couldn’t see the flash drive it had just booted from — because the system handled the boot process but then handed control of USB over to the WinPE OS, and the Windows 7 kernel didn’t have native support for USB 3.0.)

If you can, try something like a ping test within your boot environment. I haven’t worked with MDT, but on boot images created with SCCM, if the correct option was enabled at creation, you can press F8 to open Command Prompt. On regular Windows Setup Media, you can press Shift+F10.

If the ping test works, have you perhaps updated your boot image to a newer version of WinPE by using a newer ADK recently? Starting with WinPE 10 1809, SMBv1 support is disabled by default, so if your network share doesn’t support SMBv2, you won’t be able to connect to it from default environments running that WinPE kernel or newer. The ideal fix there would be to update the firmware or software on whatever is hosting that share since SMBv1 is horribly insecure and SMBv2 offers vastly better performance. SMBv2 was also introduced over a decade ago now, but for some reason there are still some NAS appliances and similar devices that still only support v1....

Make sure you check the Bios in perhaps the Thunderbolt area to see if there is an option for booting..  I have to use that in order to boot from a flash drive plugged into a dock on one of my systems.  

Otherwise, I don't have any experience with the PXE process..

jcjcmoore,

Thank you for the update.

Dell-Jesse L

What was the specific dongle you had to order? We are in the same situation