This may be an isolated incident, as I’ve already written about how my Windows Server 2003 SP2 installation appeared to be broken (but was ultimately successful) but ever since SP2 was installed, I’ve been warned about service startup failures and have been unable to PXE boot to RIS.

I haven’t bothered too much – my RIS server is used for XP builds and I rarely need to build XP machines these days but as there are no fully-featured Windows Vista display drivers for my IBM ThinkPad T40, I wanted to rebuild it on XP today.

It turns out that the problem was trivial. RIS has been replaced in Windows Server 2003 SP2 by Windows Deployment Services (WDS). WDS includes something called Windows Deployment Services Legacy – which looks remarkably like RIS to me (it uses WDS binaries to provide RIS functionality). I fired up the Windows Deployment Services Legacy administrative tool and performed a diagnostic check, after which PXE boots resulted in a successful connection to the OSChooser.