Today I had an interesting PXE boot problem where a computer kept aborting the PXE boot. So I checked the SMSPXE.log and found that there were no advertisements for that machine:
Client boot action reply: <ClientIDReply><Identification Unknown=”0″ ItemKey=”16777684″ ServerName=””><Machine><ClientID/><NetbiosName/></Machine></Identification><PXEBootAction LastPXEAdvertisementID=”” LastPXEAdvertisementTime=”” OfferID=”” OfferIDTime=”” PkgID=”” PackageVersion=”” PackagePath=”” BootImageID=”” Mandatory=””/></ClientIDReply>
F0:1F:AF:6C:05:53, 4C4C4544-0047-5310-8034-C3C04F595931: no advertisements found
F0:1F:AF:6C:05:53, 4C4C4544-0047-5310-8034-C3C04F595931: No boot action. Aborted.
F0:1F:AF:6C:05:53, 4C4C4544-0047-5310-8034-C3C04F595931: Not serviced.
The machine was previously deployed with SCCM and we were rebuilding it. The computer was definitely in a collection with an OS Deployment advertisement that was working fine on other machines. It turns out that the computer had been renamed, and the computer record for the old name was still present in ConfiMgr. I ran the following SQL query to find the computer name of any records in the database using the MAC address of that machine, then I deleted the record from the ConfigMgr console. After this, the PXE boot worked fine 🙂
select sm.ItemKey, Netbios_Name0, MAC_Addresses0, GUID, si.SMBIOS_GUID0, Hardware_ID0 from System_MAC_Addres_ARR sm inner join MachineIdGroupXRef mx on sm.ItemKey=mx.MachineID inner join System_AUX_Info si on sm.ItemKey=si.ItemKey where MAC_Addresses0='F0:1F:AF:6C:05:53'
ItemKey 16777684
Netbios_Name0 My-Computer-lt-05
MAC_Addresses0 F0:1F:AF:6C:05:53
GUID GUID:1dba29f3-350e-4a4c-a171-1e2ef1fe8f95
SMBIOS_GUID0 4C4C4544-0047-5310-8034-C3C04F595931
Hardware_ID0 2:84912D65A9328FFCBB0CA60D9EC952D9A21AA955
