How to fire a deployment job from pxe menu (not just a script)

I don't have an answer as to how to do what you're asking but rather the question of why you're doing what your doing. Is there a reason you want the "dumb" users to image their own machines? It sounds like trouble to me. It's only a matter of time before one of the "dumb" users makes a "dumb" mistake and images a machine that should not have been, losing data in the process.

Within the Deployment Console, under Jobs right click on intial deployment. This is where you setup intial deployment jobs.

Otherwise, you can setup the boot option under the PXE configuration utility and select the DS Tab.

Thanks for the reply, I understand how to use Initial Deployment and run jobs from there. What I am trying to do is force Initial deployment to run by creating a PXE menu option. The reason is this:

This is a school that that will have several hundred student laptops brought in over the summer to be re-imaged. The people that will be performing the imaging will not be technicians and it would be easiest if they could just follow a script, i.e. "hit f12 to network boot, choose re-image NC6320, etc."

Some machines might already be known to Altiris but most will not. That is why simply enabling initial deployment would not be a good solution. Any other ideas would be great. Thanks

I getting close to figuring this out I think... I found that you can manually run bootwork.exe (the thing you see when it says hit F2 for diagnostics) with a swich of -new which is supposed to run the initial deployment event. except it does not work... also trying to figure out the bootwork.ini file. The settings in there do not relate to the available swiches listed in the documentation for bootwork.exe

The following works in a DOS PXE config:

Create a new configuration, choose DOS as the Pre-boot OS, go through and create the settings.

When you get to step 9, edit the autoexec.bat file as follows:

Look for the following line in the autoexec.bat file:

SET ALTIRIS_SHARE=$$SHARE$$

Add the following entry immediately after this line:

REM ===================================
REM Force Altiris to see this as a new computer
REM  ---------------------------------------------------------
Set NEWCOMP=-forcenew

Now, when you PXE boot, hit F8, choose this configuration from the menu, and you'll be prompted for the initial deployment job and config you want to run (you have to configure those in initial deployment).

HOWEVER, I agree with the post above - if you do this, you could potentially have all kinds of people imaging their computers. There's an article similar to this one on Altirigos where the admin adds in a password requirement. So, copying from a post in Altirigos by "Peter539" (giving credit where credit is due, but updating for using automation rather than a floppy disk), REM out all entries in the startnet bat related to
%net%:\bwlogin $$PwlFileTitle$$
Or, do not enter credentials in step 6. This will allow you to configure the bootworks option to require a helpdesk or other user to enter their username and password before they are allowed to perform an Intial Deployment Job.
The person running the job will have to have the credentials to connect to the eXpress share.

I do not recommend using the forcenew option wholesale without disabling the username/password option as well.