PENDING OSD via PXE to "Known" Devices, not working!

[Swaleway]

Hello! I have been on a war path with MECM since Microsoft announced they were cutting back MDT support for Win 11 and I have turned to this forum for many answers over the last 12 months, but I am struggling to find an answer to this one, so any help would be appreciated:

I have set up OSD over PXE for the many sites that I support and it is working as I need to when working with "Unknown PCs", having deployed my task sequences to the Unknown Devices collection. I want to now be able to re-image PCs that already exist in the MECM Database, so I have created a new device collection that picks up PCs from the all devices group that contain a sting of text that we use to identify machines at my company. I have deployed a task sequence to this collection.

When I PXE boot a PC in this group it connects to the MECM server, loads in the boot image WIM file, gets to the configuration manager white screen, then reboots, and starts to load the WIM again and again. As soon as I delete the machine from the database so it becomes unknown, it gets to the task sequences selection screen and works.

I have looked at the SMSPXE log file and just see it loading the WIM file, then starting to load it again once it reboots.

Can anyone help?

Thanks!

 

[Prajwal Desai]

I had previously dealt with this problem, where I had to manually remove the device from the database in order to make PXE boot function. The smspxe log file should contain a reason why this is happening. Is the mac address of the device that you pxe boot shows in the log file?

 

[Swaleway]

Hey! Thanks for the reply.

Yes I can see the mac address in the PXE log.
PXE: 00:BE:43:99:04:7E: 16777335, GUID:306c2acd-322f-4547-81d0-2eb56829d412, SMBIOS ID is a match, MAC Address is a match. SCCMPXE 18/06/2024 08:00:05 5968 (0x1750)

It finds the boot image and starts to load the WIM. Then as soon as it hits the white config manager screen it reboots the machine.

No errors showing in the log, it is very odd!

 

[Swaleway]

Ah, so I have managed to turn on f8 help and look in the smsts.log file and it says "no task sequences available to this computer" but when I look in my console on the device collection I can clearly see a Task sequence is pushed to that collection

 

[Prajwal Desai]

The message "No task sequences available to this computer" appears when the target machine has a task sequence deployed and duplicate MAC addresses exist in the SCCM database.

https://www.prajwaldesai.com/sccm-mac-address-query-find-device-name/

 

[Swaleway]

The device I am imaging is in the database already, as I have already imaged it once, but I am wanting to re-image it again without removing it from the database and making it "unknown" to SCCM.

I have moved it into a custom collection and deployed the task sequence to that collection, but it wont let me choose a task sequence when it PXE boot it just restarts, then shows this error in the log about no task sequence.

So yes there is a duplicate mac address as it has already been imaged once. Is it possible to image it once it is already in the database or not? Do I always have to delete it first to clear out the mac address?