When you add the legacy adapter to a Hyper-V virtual machine to do an PXE boot and you notice that you don’t get an IP address something is wrong. The following needs to be checked.

BIOS startup order

Is the legacy adapter added to the VM

The basis settings are now checked. You will get an IP if everything else is set up good within DHCP and RIS.

But what if you see that the boot process is disturbed because the network drivers can’t be loaded. Let’s take a look at the version of the RIS server. If it is Windows Server 2003 SP2, then you probably will be fine. If you’re running RIS on Windows Server 2003 SP1 and you do a PXE boot to this system from a Hyper-V based VM then there is a change that you will not be successful. The cause is a missing network driver. Similar problem in this post: http://blogs.technet.com/raghavan/archive/2009/05/12/3239838.aspx. The solution could be the following.

• Extract the dc21×4vm.inf and dc21×4vm.dll from a Vista based OS and inject them into the RIS RemoteInstall directory. The following path is an example: “D:\RemoteInstall\Setup\[language]\Images\[OSFolder]\i386”
• Restart the RIS service.

(or you could upgrade to WDS on Server 2008 R2..  J  )

Now boot the VM again and see of the RIS process continues.

Don’t forget to remove the legacy adapter and add the Synthetic NIC again.

Happy RISsing..