19 October 2016

PXE Boot | Boot into WinPE then Immediate Restart

I recently came across a little issue where I was PXE Booting a machine into the WinPE environment to start a Task Sequence to image the machine.  Once it had loaded and it had passed the "Loading Network Settings" window, it immediately restarted.

The most common cause for this is that you don't have the correct NIC drivers.  I rebooted again, then pressed F8 which brought me to a command prompt.   Once I was there, I waited until  it went past the "Loading Network Settings" page, then ran an IPCONFIG to see whether I got an IP address.  In this case I did.  That means it wasn't a NIC driver issue.

The next thing to check is the BIOS time.  Make sure this is accurate.  In my case, this wasn't accurate at all.  Once I reset this,  I rebooted again into WinPE, and the Task Sequence started without any problem.

A quick 5 second fix could help you save an hour of troubleshooting!

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