UEFI PXE Boot for Surface Pro with Configuration Manager 2012 R2 #RDProud

Hi all,

The last days I’ve been struggling to enable a Surface Pro 2 tablet to PXE boot while different kinds of HP laptops were able to PXE boot in the same VLAN. The only difference between the 2 types is that the laptops all had BIOS while the Surface Pro 2 tablet only supports UEFI.

First of all I had to update the firmware of the device using the files on this website: https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=38826 That was needed because PXE boot wasn’t supported with the firmware that was installed on the device.

PXE boot options were added in the DHCP Scope:

• Option 66: FQDN of the PXE server (in this case the Configuration Manager 2012 R2 primary site server)
• Option 67: SMSBoot\x86\wdsnbp.com

When booting the Surface Pro 2 I receive the following error:

Looking further into this error I found that option 67 should be SMSBoot\x64\wdsmgfw.efi in stead of SMSBoot\x86\wdsnbp.com

So I’ve edited the DHCP Scope options as follows:

• Option 66: FQDN of the PXE server (in this case the Configuration Manager 2012 R2 primary site server)
• Option 67: SMSBoot\x64\wdsmgfw.efi

I performed another PXE boot with the Surface Pro 2 device but I received the following error: “Windows Deployment Services encountered the following error 0x102”

To avoid this behaviour DHCP option 60 should also be added with value “PXEClient”.

When I wanted to add this option I saw it was missing from the default DHCP scope options list (because WDS and DHCP are not installed on the same server). I had to set this option using the commands listed below in a cmd as administrator:

C:\WINDOWS\system32>netsh
netsh>dhcp
netsh dhcp>server \\<server_machine_name>
netsh dhcp>add optiondef 60 PXEClient String 0 comment=PXE support
netsh dhcp>set optionvalue 60 STRING PXEClient
netsh dhcp>exit

The DHCP options are now:

• Option 60: PXEClient
• Option 66: FQDN of the PXE server (in this case the Configuration Manager 2012 R2 primary site server)
• Option 67: SMSBoot\x64\wdsmgfw.efi

A final test was a successful PXE boot with the Surface Pro 2 device.

Disadvantage of this is that devices doing PXE boot from BIOS will no longer be able to boot, this can be solved by using different DHCP scopes for different kind of devices.

Hope this information is usefull for you guys!

 

Best regards,

B