We are a business of under 200 PC's that are looking at implementing preventative maintenance tasks such as regular imaging or updates but would like to see if there is a better method then IT coming in on a weekend every month to turn on the PC's and do whatever the task is.
We are a MS Server house, we are using WDS to capture and deploy images and use MS DHCP.
Many moons ago I worked at a school that had primarily Unix servers (ISC DHCP) and the guy there built a system where the PC's would boot into PXE and quickly determine whether the PC was earmarked for imaging or if it is meant to boot into Windows. This was a great system, but I had little to do with the maintenance or development and so don't know how it was exactly implemented.
What I was wondering is if there is a way of implementing something like this using MS Servers, DHCP and WDS. We would like to be able to set a flag for a PC to boot into WinPE or to boot from the Hard Disk. I was hoping we could setup a database (MS SQL Server) which could contain the PC MAC Address and a flag for whether the PC boots into Windows (local HDD) or WinPE (PXE Boot)?
We are wanting the PC's to be always set to boot from the NIC first and HDD second so whatever solution we implement the boot time to Windows shouldn't be too much longer then it currently is, as the PC's would be booting to local HDD more often then not we don't want the users waiting for minutes for PXE to time out or WinPE to fully load.
Driver updates and software deployment aren't typical reasons to reimage a machine. You may want to reconsider your larger strategy here and approach it from a new angle. Something like SCCM will handle Windows updates, software deployment, driver updates, etc and it can also be leveraged for operating system deployment as well.
Hardware vendors like Lenovo typically release driver and utility packs for SCCM that make this very easy.
This does not require a user to leave their PC on 24/7 and doesn't even require them to be connected to your corporate network if you use a DMZ/Internet distribution point. The SCCM agent will "check in" periodically for new software to install.
But to answer your actual question - no, WDS has no built-in functionality to only image a machine occasionally. You'd have to play with removing and re-adding the netbootGuid attribute from each PC's computer account in AD if you wanted to, but that would require some custom scripting or application development on your end.