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I’ve had one major problem that simply could not be resolved with one Lenovo model once…

@jim-holcomb snarky answer: Dude, you should have bought a Dell…
We have seen more issues with EFI and flaky Lenovo firmware than most other manufacturers hardware.

I am a bit surprised that ipxe.efi or snponly.efi did not work with your network adapter. Did they all stop at initializing devices?

If you don’t need uefi mode, switch the device back to legacy (bios) mode. That should fix your startup issues. You do have to be aware if you want to deploy an captured OS to a UEFI system, the image must have been captured from a UEFI system. You can not deploy a bios based source image to a uefi based target computer.

We do have a solution for the those systems that can/won’t pxe boot into iPXE. You can try to boot directly into FOS using a usb boot drive. The instructions and caveats are outlined here: https://forums.fogproject.org/topic/7727/building-usb-booting-fos-image

I can get you quickly up to step seven in the instructions. I just rebuilt the boot image the other day. I’ll DM you a link to it. Use rufus to “burn” the image to a 512MB or larger usb flash drive. If FOS can’t init your network adapter then you might consider using a usb network adapter with a usb boot. But lets try the FOS boot.

@sebastian-roth Am I correct in my understanding that the only difference here is the ISO needs mounted to /var/www instead of /var/www/html ?

@jim-holcomb Well if the PC is in uefi mode, you need to update your dhcp server to send ipxe.efi instead of undionly.kpxe as a test to see if you can boot this lenovo. If it works then you need to make a decision about the path forward.

@sebastian-roth OK now that we’ve identified that iPXE is having an issue init’ing the tigon driver, how about trying plan “B” booting directly info FOG? Its not the cleanest solution but it might allow the OP the ability to image these computers???

@jim-holcomb said in stuck at “ipxe initialising devices..” (Lenovo):

I am using undionly.kpxe

Is the device in uefi or bios (legacy) mode? >UEFI

Whelp these to are incompatible. For uefi mode you need to send ipxe.efi to the target computer. But one would think that you should get an error before that if you are sending a bios mode file to a uefi based computer. Unless the computer auto switches based on the boot medium. I know some servers will do that.

@x23piracy said in FOG Client / FOS report bios product key to database (Host) Activate through BIOS key (Deployment):

Windows as subscription will come

Um, yeah its already here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/deployment/windows-10-enterprise-subscription-activation

Solution: Switch to Linux Mint and your M$ problems go away.

Well it appears you are running on 1.5.0 RC<something> because your SV release is after my production server (which is a good thing you are on a current release).

I guess we need to start with,

1. what hardware are you using (model)?
2. Is the device in uefi or bios (legacy) mode?
3. Have you installed the latest firmware on that target computer?

Hello Julien,

Help me to understand. FOG can activate Windows 10 computers with OEM keys, but it can not activate Windows 10 with Education keys.

If I understand correctly:

1. Did you use the MS Volume license media to create your reference image you want to activate with the education keys?
2. Do you have education KMS or MAK keys. If you use MAK keys your target computers will need to have direct internet access to activate.

@msi Sorry maybe I wasn’t clear. Your batch file route can be saved as a .bat (but is probably better saved as a .cmd). You can deploy that as a snapin just as I had outlined.

The second part of my comment was to the reason why you are doing this. If you have to fix 100 computers that have already been deployed then the snap in route is the correct one. If you are doing this because you will deploy 100 computers in the future, then there may be another path you can take. One example is if you sysprep your reference image, then you can place batch commands in the c:\windows\setup\scripts directory. After windows setup is done, and before the login screen is presented to the user, windows setup looks in that path for a batch file called setupcomplete.cmd. If it finds that file it will run it before the user can login. There is also a way to have the windows unattend.xml file run commands or add users during its execution. Which can do the same things you are doing in your batch file.

These are all different ways to get the same results. The simplest is to create a batch file snapin like you talked about.