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Hi Gary,
We've just done this with Configuration Manager - the only change required is DHCP Option 67 needs to be set to smsboot\x64\wdsmgfw.efi

Andrew.

-----Original Message-----
From: Support issues for windows in UK HE & FE <[log in to unmask]> On Behalf Of Gary Hale
Sent: 23 May 2018 11:23
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Switch from Legacy BIOS to UEFI

Hello All

It mentions in this email that you had to change your infrastructure to support UEFI network booting. May I ask what processes or changes you had to make to get PXE to work?

I have been testing PXE via Configuration Manager Current Branch over the last few days and have not successfully PXE any PC with UEFI enabled. As soon as I revert to legacy BIOS then I get 100% success rate.

Thank You

Kind Regards

Gary

-----Original Message-----
From: Support issues for windows in UK HE & FE <[log in to unmask]> On Behalf Of Mike Sandells
Sent: 15 May 2018 16:51
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: Switch from Legacy BIOS to UEFI

On 14/05/2018 17:08, Skender Osmani wrote:
> All,
>
> Just wanted to get a feel as to how many of you have moved from using
> legacy BIOS to UEFI. Currently we are still configuring new PCs to use
> legacy BIOS and are working to get our backend infrastructure ready to
> support UEFI network booting. We have number of dual boot machines
> (Windows and Linux) and use syslinux/pxelinux to provide a boot menu
> for students to choose which OS to boot. Syslinux/pxelinux does not
> provide full support for UEFI network boot and we are looking at iPXE
> as an alternative to do the above.
>
> We have been testing new DELL machines with Intel 8th gen processors
> and have found that if you configure legacy BIOS on the machine, you
> can no longer boot to the local disk. We also got this confirmed by
> DELL. This feature/limitation will push us to accelerate the switch
> from legacy BIOS to UEFI.



This would be a bit of a headache for us.

We switched to UEFI for new staff installs back in 2016, and around that time we attempted to switch to UEFI for our student PCs.

The staff side has been fine, but we ran into trouble on the student PCs and ended up rolling everything back and sticking with Legacy boot.

The problem there was UEFI PXE - not so much in getting it to work at all, but in getting it to work reliably and without side-effects.

E.g. cancelling out of a UEFI PXE boot by hitting Esc at the boot menu could lead to windows booting with no network available until the PC was restarted. We also had a much higher rate of issues with PCs failing during the PXE boot process, and sitting on an error screen rather than rebooting and going round again. (This is not great when re-imaging a room overnight via wake-on-lan, as the machines are then stuck until someone manually intervenes.)

Obviously, if UEFI-only hardware is on the horizon, we'll have to deal with it again, but our general impression of UEFI PXE was that it still needed work to be as useful as legacy PXE.

Mike
--
Mike Sandells
The University of Liverpool - Computing Services Department
Email: [log in to unmask] (*Preferred*) -  Phone: 0151 794 4437 http://www.liverpool.ac.uk/csd


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