Today I did some work for a customer who had already installed configuration manager, but they had not set up deployment. I enabled PXE on the distribution point but the clients did not get a repsonse when trying to pxe boot. The first place I check is the SMSPXE.LOG to see what happends but the file did not exist.
SMSPXE.LOG is usually located in “configmgr installation path”\Logs, but I have sometimes also seen it in “C:\windows\system32” and “<X>\program files\SMS_CCM\Logs”. I have no idea why it ends up in these places, but I have made a habbit to check them if I cant find it in the default log dir. But in this case the smspxe.log file wasnt located anywhere and even when I performed a windows file search for I could not find it.
It turned out that SCCM had not configured the Windows Deployment Service properly. The WDS service wasnt running and it failed with an error message when I tried to start it.
This is how I fixed it:
- Disabled PXE on the distribution point
- Let windows reconfigure WDS service.
From a command prompt:- wdsutil /uninitialize-server
- wdsutil /initialize-server /reminst:D:\RemoteInstall
- Enable PXE on the distribution point. SCCM will now configure the WDS service and automaticly populate it with its boot images.
