Elias sighed, rubbing his eyes. He was trying to roll out a fleet of fifty machines for the marketing department’s morning orientation. He had triggered the PXE boot, expecting the familiar SCCM splash screen. Instead, he was met with a sequence of events that felt like a personal insult from the server gods. He checked the smspxe.log
: Standard STP takes up to 30–50 seconds to transition a switch port to the forwarding state.
The device may not be a member of a collection that has a Task Sequence deployed as "Available" or "Required" for PXE/Media.
The most powerful tool in SCCM is the log file. Press F8 to open a command prompt in WinPE and navigate to X:\Windows\Temp\SMSTSLog .
Add the MAC address of the shared USB adapter/docking station to the exclusion list so SCCM ignores it for device identification.
As the single most common cause of this error, driver issues must be examined thoroughly.
The client machine resides in an IP subnet that is not assigned to a valid SCCM Boundary Group. Step-by-Step Troubleshooting Guide
Intel Volume Management Device (VMD) or RAID settings masking the drive. Storage failure blocks variable caching.
Add the driver to your properties under the Drivers tab. Update the Distribution Points with the new boot image. 2. Time and Date Mismatch (Very Common)
In SCCM PXE booting, after the client downloads the boot image (WIM file) via TFTP, the client initiates a process to locate the management point and download a small file called variables.dat . This file contains:
If the DP's disk is low on space, the PXE variable file may not be created properly: