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Need help with bare metal / dead machine deployment

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I've been using Snap Deploy for laptop testing of systems that stay in one of those laptop charging carts and trying to automate re-imaging them for testing, rinse and repeat. Some of the things I'd like to do that does not seem to work or is discussed or documented are as follows:

1. WOL from machine list - All systems have WOL enabled and I can wake them or use other tools to wake them but can't for the life of me get snap deploy server to do so from the machine list. Any ideas?

2. PXE booting into management agent - I can setup PXE boot to boot into the management agent so a dead machine could be booted into this and image. I can't, however, figure out how to bypass PXE booting when it's not needed. Is there a way to boot up into management console, have a countdown timer and if no task are engaging snap deploy continue to boot the laptop normally? Also, my Insyde bios on the laptop does not automatically go down the device list when booting. If I set the device to PXE boot and then boot windows boot manager, if PXE boot times out it sits there with an error. It doesn't error out and then boot the system normally.

3. Bare metal - again, not much documentation for this. I can remotely power on a dead machine but how do I configure an environment such that I can pxe boot into management agent and re-image the dead machine but then once done have it always boot normally? It doesn't seem I can PXE boot unless PXE boot is my first boot priority. If my machine is dead, how can I get snap deploy to boot it into PXE, re-image it and then have the machine boot normally again? Ideally it would be nice if a system boots windows boot manager first and only PXE boots programmatically when snap deploy asks it to do so. Is this possible? How do I have my cake and eat it too? I need to be able to move this laptop charging station into a remote co-location for testing in this new pandemic world so I literally need the ability remotely to do everything, including booting a corrupt pc and re-imaging it.

 

Any help on these topics would be wonderful. Thanks!

 

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Hello ERIC TRIP

in the public access we have the following materials, which might be helpful:
Booting the target machines https://www.acronis.com/en-us/support/documentation/ASD5/index.html#135…

When the deployment is about to start, the software will turn on the target machines with predefined MAC addresses by using the BIOS Wake-on-LAN (WOL) functionality. If this does not happen, you may want checking https://kb.acronis.com/content/5798 

For other questions we'd recommend opening a support ticket, so that our engineers can look into the situation and provide the more in-depth guidance.