Unlocking "ForcePXEonNextBoot" option on Dell Laptops?

[larry.b]

Hello, I'm new on this site, maybe people here can help me:

I'm IT admin and my company is starting a "Zero Touch" Windows 7 migration. In brief the goal is to capture data from XP, reboot the pc to PXE and install Windows 7 and restore data.

Dell offers the ability to order a computer to start at the next boot in PXE Mode by settings a bios option called "ForcePXEonNextBoot", this BIOS option can be set from Windows with WMI after having installed the dell OCMI client.

Unfortunately it seems that DELL has disabled this settings on their Laptops BIOS (it has the value of 2 that means "unsupported") I've tried on differents DELL Latitude Models, D620,D630,E4300,... this settings seems to be readonly.

I think the function ForcePXEonNextBoot is existing but DELL has disabled it, so my question is do you think i'm right and do you have an idea how to bypass the lock and writing this settings with a value different from 2?

Thank you!

Larry

[kizwan]

Unfortunately it seems that DELL has disabled this settings on their Laptops BIOS (it has the value of 2 that means "unsupported") I've tried on differents DELL Latitude Models, D620,D630,E4300,... this settings seems to be readonly.

I think the function ForcePXEonNextBoot is existing but DELL has disabled it, so my question is do you think i'm right and do you have an idea how to bypass the lock and writing this settings with a value different from 2?

It's unlikely Dell locked "ForcePXEonNextBoot". The most likely explanation is the function is not exist in Dell laptops.

Most Dell Computers have Dell BIOS which is different than Phoenix BIOS.