Patent ID: 8332490

Claim:
A method of providing operating system software to a computer system hardware platform which has a plurality of elements including vital product data, an adapter card, BIOS software, a memory element which stores executable program code, and a baseboard management controller component, the method comprising: exercising the baseboard management controller in response to application of standby power to gather from the vital product data and the adapter card data identifying the hardware configuration of the hardware platform and supply the gathered data to the baseboard management controller and the BIOS; formulating the identifying hardware platform data to include a class identifier field denoting a corresponding preboot execution environment and specific operating system; communicating from the baseboard management controller to the BIOS and to a dynamic host configuration protocol server the formulated identifying data to obtain a network address for an appropriate network bootstrap server; communicating from the hardware platform to the appropriate network bootstrap server the formulated identifying data of the hardware platform; and providing from the network bootstrap server the preboot execution environment and operating system corresponding to the class identifier in the identifying data.