Brand New HP Laptops cannot PXE boot to FOG

[anothersysadmin]

I recently received a large batch of HP G4 Dragonfly (6Q249AV) computers for deployment and a coworker and I can not get any of them to PXE boot. They always get stuck at “iPXE initializing devices…” We have tried disabling the computer’s MAC Address passthrough, updating the boot kernel, updating the FOG server, secure erasing the computers from UEFI, multiple different ethernet adapters even a few sold directly through HP, and directly booting to two different custom PXE ISOs. So far nothing we have tried has had any effect.
Before we received or even ordered the HP G4s, HP had sent us 4 demo units of HP Elite G3 Dragonfly (6F7X4UT#ABA) computers and all 4 of those computers has worked nearly flawlessly on our network, we had some minor hiccups because of the MAC Address passthrough at first but that is solved now. I do not understand why it would work fine on a slightly older model but then not at all on a newer model. Any guidance or ideas? Thanks.

[george1421]

@anothersysadmin The stuck at “iPXE initializing…” is iPXE saying that its having a problem configuring the hardware. I can see this happening on really new hardware.

1. I would start out with ensuing the firmware is up to date on the target computer.
2. See if rebuilding/compiling iPXE with the latest release solves the issue. https://forums.fogproject.org/topic/15826/updating-compiling-the-latest-version-of-ipxe

Understand this is a problem between iPXE, uefi firmware, and the hardware. FWIW: iPXE is created by another opensource project.