Hi all, I've been chewing on this problem for several days, and have not had much success. We recently upgraded to 7.5 HF5 from 7.1, and have implemented Deployment for the first time.
The issue we're running into, is that Managed computers that have pre-existing records in the SMC image fine, either by assigning the job in the SMC, or using the deployment menu in the WinPE boot. No issues there.
However...
With PC's the do NOT have a pre-existing record in the SMC, they can be booted into WinPE manually (F8), and the Initial Deployment menu comes up. You can select a job, and a record is created in the SMC, and assigned to the deployment job. However the job stays in the "waiting for agent to get task" status. Looking at the SMP.log file on the client, it is attempting to register with the Task server, and the status is "PENDING".
Now, if you reboot the workstation (and cancel the scheduled job), you can then boot it back into WinPE PXE, and you now get the "Managed Computers" menu instead of initial deployment, so it's obviously seeing the computer record that was created on the previous attemp. However you get the same result as during the initial deployment boot.
If you take that same PC, boot it into windows, install the Symantec Management Agent on it, let it send a basic inventory, then reboot it into PXE, the PECTAgent registers with the task server just fine, and jobs execute without a problem.
So where I'm at right now, is I have to boot all new PC's, install the agent, and have them check in, before they can be imaged. I've found lots of articles on both Symantec and the web in general that are sort of similar, but so far every fix, suggestion, and wild theory I've tried has yielded no results. Does anyone have any ideas?
I'll open a support ticket on Monday, but figured I'd post this article in the meantime.