RIS \ WDS deployment of Windows 2003 Server, PXE boot low memory problems

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Hi all, this is my first post! i've been a member for a little while and i've been able to resolve a few problems / get plenty of good MCSA related answers without having to post anything so far!

At work we have been forced to upgrade out 2000 based SQL servers to 2k3.

We've been looking down the RIS route now for the last few days but i've been majorly struggling to get PXE boot to initiate propperly. I've riprep'd the server that we're taking the image from and i'm perfectly able to PXE boot from other machines (laptops etc).

The servers were trying to load the image onto are IBM Netfinity 6000R boxes.
4 * CPU (Pentium 3's)
4GB ram.
2* IBM GIGABIT ETHERNET SX SERVER ADAPTERS - (these dont seem to be capable of PXE boot - they are based on an Intel 1000 chipset - but as it is IBM they dont offer any support / downloads for it)((the IBM Boot agent fails miserably when you try to enable PXE boot.)
1* Broadcom Netxtreme Gig card, (These do PXE boot - after loads of messing about)

The problem is that once the PXE boot initiates and you press F12 to run the RIS install IMMEDIATELY an error comes up:
"Windows NT has found only 505k of low memory, 512K of low memory is required to run Windows NT"

Thats it... I've tried all sorts -

updated the bios on the server (was v1.09 now 1.10)

Tried booting from a generic network boot disk (from here www.netbootdisk.com) and then running the startrom.com file... (this does nothing)

Tried one of the linux boot disks for both of the network cards from the above site..

Googled to death, theres been loads of problems with this along the way, all the DHCP scope options are set and working for other machines...

Does ANYONE have an idea about this 'low memory' error...

I'm completely stumped and looks like we are going to be building all of our servers manually which means moreeee down time which our 24 hour users wont like one bit ..

Thanks!

 

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Does your boot floppy have himem.sys on it? Its the only thing I can think of that may give the results your getting if its not there.

 

Umm well i'm actually PXE booting straight from the network card, so i'm not using a floppy. I have tried a couple of different things from floppy,
1) bog standard RIS boot disk, built from RBFG.exe (I've downloaded the latest version of rbfg - my network card isn't supported)
2) Generic network boot disk, once booted map a drive to startrom.com file and try to run it but that did nothing.

So in answer to your question i dont have that file as i'm not actually booting from floppy.

I've got a feeling it is to something *like* the size of the rom on either the bios or the network card bios (or something) isn't big enough for the startrom.com image therefore gives the

"Windows NT has found only 505k of low memory, 512K of low memory is required to run Windows NT" error..

I can't find anything to support this.

any other ideas?