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DarinMarsh-0835 avatar image
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DarinMarsh-0835 asked AllenLiu-MSFT commented

How to have a deleted device come back as unknown

I have a lab of 30 computers/devices that I deleted out of sccm with the intention of re-imaging them using a totally different Task Sequence. I feel like I've done this before and when the deleted devices pxe boot they have always been recognized as unknown devices and all TSes deployed to unknown devices were available.
Now these devices won't pxe boot until I manually add them to a device collection, then the only TS available is the one I have deployed to the device collection. Moreover when I try to run the task sequence it fails. The task sequence does not have a driver pack associated, it is simply an OSD with apps and I have used it many times on same brand/model computers.
I feel like when I deleted the computers they didn't get completely removed from the db which is causing them not to come back as unknown. Are there db table/s that I need to clean up in order to get these systems to pxe boot and come back as unknown devices?
Thanks for any insight.

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1 Answer

AllenLiu-MSFT avatar image
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AllenLiu-MSFT answered AllenLiu-MSFT commented

Hi, @DarinMarsh-0835
Thank you for posting in Microsoft Q&A forum.

First we should know what is unknown computer for SCCM, an unknown computer is a computer that is not managed by Configuration Manager. This means that there is no record of these computers in the Configuration Manager database. Unknown computers include the following:

  1. A computer where the Configuration Manager client is not installed

  2. A computer that is not imported into Configuration Manager

  3. A computer that is not been discovered by Configuration Manager

To delete the device in SCCM, we can just delete computer record from SCCM.
Then we should make sure the devices are not exist in AD, if they are still in AD, the devices will be discovered again by SCCM. Or we can configured the device discovery method to exclude the OU with the deleted devices in AD.

And are the deleted computers still have the client agent installed? If you delete the computers record and the Configuration Manager client is still installed and communicating with Configuration Manager, Heartbeat Discovery recreates the client record the Configuration Manager database, although the client history and any previous associations are lost.


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