How to boot 64-bit Boot Image from WDS PXE when only 32-bit will show

This is something that has beeen bugging me ever since I set up our BDD 2007 + WDS setup almost a year ago. Even though I was able to create a 64-bit WIM boot image via MDT and load it onto the WDS server, the 64-bit Boot Image was never shown to me when PXE booting from a 64-bit capable PC. All I could see and boot, was the 32-bit boot images. Argh!

After fruitless searching I resigned myself to the fact that if I wanted to deploy Vista 64 I’d just burn an ISO of the 64-bit WinPE Boot Image and install from there. Fortunately, we rarely need to deploy 64-bit Vista, but this may change soon.

However, just now, I found the solution…

To enable 64-bit Boot Images via PXE with WDS, you need to run this command on the WDS Server:

wdsutil /set-server /architecturediscovery:yes

Why this was never mentioned in the Documentation that I read for MDT/BDD I’ll never know (maybe I just missed it), but finally I can boot to 64-bit WinPE and deploy 64-bit Vista from the network, hooray! 😀

I found the answer on EggHeadCafe by searching for: “mdt 2008 deploy 64-bit vista pxe”. Roughly half way down the hard-to-read page was the nugget I needed.

For reference, there’s a proper Microsoft KB article explaining the solution.

Really hopes this helps someone out!