PC booting into Automation if I power it off after hang or crash

[Migration User]

Hi All,

Got an odd problem.  If one of our new Optiplex 960 PC's hangs or crashes and it requires us to power it off via the power button, everytime it reboots for the firs time, it will boot into the Altiris Automation paritiion, connect to the Deployment server, wait for 30 seconds or so and then reboots, after which it starts Windows XP normally.

Rebooting or shutting the PC down as you would normally doesn't cause this problem.  It's only when you forcably power the PC off.

I'm about to deploy this new image to over 500 PC's shortly and I don't want this short of thing to happen.  I work at a school so the amount of grief I'd get from teachers would be untold.

Any ideas what might be happening.  Everything else works fine.

Many thanks

Leonard

[Migration User]

This is the preboot automation.  Its a "feature" of the automation.  It will do it to every PC that has the automation.  The only problem you  might encounter is if you have initial deployment turned on and the computer is not in the DS, well that and the annoyence of the computers booting to the automation.

[Migration User]

Hmm, Can't see how that could possibly be a feature.  No way to switch it off I guess?

Bit rubbish that it does this.  Have to think of some way of selling that as a feature.

[ianatkin]

 Hi Leonard,

Spazzzen is correct -this is an automation feature. You needn't worry though about initial deployment as by virtue of these machines having their Altiris partitions they will already be in the database.

Although this feature might be bothersome to you, let me explain how and why this happens. The automation partition is designed to allow you to reimage a computer in the event of a critical OS failure. In order to do so, two things happen on a daily basis to your computers,

1. Each time a computer starts up, the Altiris Bootloader configures itself so that the next reboot will be directed into the automation partition
2. Each time your Windows OS shutsdown nicely, the AClient sets the configures Altiris boot loader so that the computer is directed to boot into windows on the next boot.

In order therefore to a computer to boot into automation it must be somehow shutdown badly, or crash. In this scenario, the only viable OS you have to manage the computer is automation, so this is the one that now boots. This is so that you can remotely remediate the computer, either by collecting logs, re-imaging etc..

If you want to avoid this behaviour, then the only option is to uninstall your automation partitions.

As for getting grief about this behaviour, just say its a server check as the computer was shutdown badly, and mention in passing that its terribly unhealthy for the computer to be forcibly powered off. The start menu has a shutdown option for this purpose ;-)

Kind Regards,
Ian./

[Migration User]

If you don't want this feature.  You definitely could uninstall the automation partition as stated above, but still have the functionality of re-imaging a machine with an unstable OS.  To do this you would use PXE.  We use that here and love it, especially for the new machines that come in.  You would just need to set the BIOS to boot to the network as the first boot order.  PXE checks the database, if there are no jobs available it will exit out of the menu within 3 seconds (this is configurable, but we leave it at 3 as it still gives you an option to kick off the Automation client if there is a problem).

Ian, great job in explaining how the Automation Partition works!!! 

[Migration User]

Hi Ian

Thanks for that excellent explanation.  It makes total sense now and your reasoning will make my life easier when I explain it to my staff and the teachers.

We will keep is as it makes imaging so much easier.

Many thanks


Leonard