Hello,

We are currently receiving a few machines that have UEFI only firmware. We have been using DHCP option 66 and 67 with SMSBoot\\x86\\wdsnbp.com in 67 for some time now and it worked well. We did face issues with UEFI but we could always choose to select legacy BIOS firmware. This is changing and so must we.

I have been doing some troubleshooting this morning and discovered that setting DHCP Option 67 to point to SMSBoot\\x86\\wdsmgfw.efi does not seem to work.

I am running the DP on Windows Server 2012 R2 so am pretty sure that x86 UEFI should be working.

Anyway I read online that we should try using IPHelpers instead. We spent an awful long time moving away from IPHelpers (our network guys said we should and we didn't see it as a problem at the time - way back when SCCM 2007 was in R2). Setting the IPHelper seems to have worked after changing the boot image on the task sequence to use the x64 boot image. We have asked our network guys to change back to using IPHelper but I have a few questions about UEFI and deployments of x86 operating systems.

• Does the UEFI Firmware or WDS or some other mechanism detect that the machine can support x64 so just download the x64 EFI file from the remoteinstall\SMSBoot\x64 folder? If so then how does it do this detection and can we make it think it is x86? Most machines now have x64 capability so would presumably be detected as x64 but that doesn't always mean we want to deploy x64. Mostly for legacy software etc. Is the only option here to prey that the machines come with a BIOS firmware fallback? What if they don't? Are we going to have to use other boot media?

Thanks in advance for any replies.

• Edited by d4rkcell 18 hours 41 minutes ago

Architecture discovery of WDS does this and it cannot be faked. You cannot deploy a x86 OS to an x64 UEFI device, because the architectures have to match! You would have to use the legacy BIOS if you want to run a x86 OS.