Can AMT be used to change boot order and boot from a USB key?

[ramakj]

We have some systems installed in client locations that are essentially kiosks and have no keyboard attached to them. Also the BIOS is protected with passwords. We are looking at the possibility of being able to remotely tell a system to boot from a bootable USB key. Will AMT be able to help with this ?

[Gael_H_Intel]

Hi Ram,

You should be able to do a SOL/IDER session via a boot CD/DVD that is on your Management Console. You should then be able to boot into the bios of these systems and make changes that way.

Gael

[ramakj]

Hi Gael,

The method of changing the BIOS boot order will be custom logic. right ? Is there way to have IDER use a bootable USB key to start the boot process or is it only limited to CD and floppy ?

Regards,
Ram

[Gael_H_Intel]

IDER is limited to using CD or Floppy. You can Use IDER to boot to the kiosk's bios and change the boot order in order for the kiosk to then boot from a bootable USB.

[RBens2]

Hi Ram,

It looks like that you don't quite understand the IDER boot process. A management console can point to a physical CD or floppy drive, but it can also point to a CD image file (ISO) or a floppy image file. You can make the system boot to whatever image that you wish from whatever location that you wish by using the IDER capability. Unless you're planning to go to each of your kiosks and plugging in a USB key, it looks like you really are wanting to be able to boot from a CD image that's located on the HDD of your management console system.

Regards,
Roger

[Gael_H_Intel]

Roger - good catch. Yes, my preference of media to use for SOL/IDER is an image file (either ISO or a floppy image.) That way you don't have to have the physical media - it's on your hard drive.

[ramakj]

Thanks Roher/Gael. So the ISO that IDER boots off of can be of any size ? i.e even a DVD sized ISO would work ? or can it only be the size that CD can carry ?

[Gael_H_Intel]

That's an excellent question, Ram and it's good that you brought it up. If the docs for 3.x say that only CD (and not DVD) is supported - it's mainly due to a size limitation. There were issues where folks were trying to do an IDER session with a Windows 7 DVD and it was crashing due to the size of Windows 7 being larger than what a CD would handle. I beleive you can use DVDs, unofficially, but the content should fit on a CD. This was true on AMT 6 - not sure if this is the case with AMT 3.

Starting with AMT 7 we do officially support DVD. We support double layer DVD so about 8.4 GB in size. You will need to understand that it will take a long time to do an IDE-R with DVD and you may rather consider looking in the two stage boot Use Case Reference Design that is available on the vPro expert center to use the DVD images.