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I am looking for a way to upgrade all firmware on Dell PE servers from within a WinPe environment. We are a reseller and I already have an environment set up to transfer ownership of the servers to our company. I would also like to be able to run diags and update firmware on the machines with one boot disk. The basic end goal is to be able to load up the environment, run diags with results outputted to a file either locally or across network. Update the frimware then transfer ownership if needed. I could set up a multiboot usb with the winpe environment and the SUU but I am trying to avoid rebooting the machine as much as possible.

Thanks for any help you can give!

Daddy Su
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1 Answers1

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Skip the physical boot media. Use Windows Deployment Services to PXE boot into WinPE. Once booted from the network, you can mount a CIFS share which has the Dell SUU repository. From there you run the dell script to install the updates. With some cleverness you can script everything from startnet.cmd and it will need a minimal attention and one reboot.

The hardest part is making a PXE-bootable WinPE image that sees all the various Dell storage and network apaptors. Fortunately, Dell has a set of tools to help get set up with WinPE - look for the "DTK" deployment toolkit, which has a script to inject all the needed Dell drivers into the WinPE image. Once you've got a working PXE-bootable WinPE image, the rest is easy. And as a bonus, with PXE/PE it is easy to inject new drivers and tools into the PE image to support new server models later in time.

AndyN
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