Serge Chegorian's System Center Blog

Serge Chegorian's System Center Blog

No response from Windows Deployment Services server

March 26th, 2014

When attempting to PXE boot from SCCM 2007 or 2012 PXE boot point you may have the following symptom:

  • Windows Deployment Services service is stopped and cannot be started.

The most likely cause of it is the corrupted boot image (WinPE WIM) file.

Workaround:

Remove all boot images from the affected PXE Boot/DP. Start WDS service. Then start adding images one by one. Restart WDS once you can see every new package under :\RemoteInstall\SMSIMAGES\SMSPKG. If WDS crashes again, this is the corrupted one. You will need fix or regenerate this WinPE image.

Sometimes you may have this error message:

Downloaded WDSNBP...

Architecture: x64
WDSNBP started using DHCP Referral.
Contacting Server: 10.1.242.33 (Gateway: 10.1.204.1)...
No response from Windows Deployment Services server.
Launching pxeboot.com...
Press F12 for network service boot
If I press F12, I receive a Windows Boot Manager error message (which I would expect if there's no response from the server):
Windows failed to start (etc.)
File: \Boot\BCD
Status: 0xc000000f
Info: An error occurred while attempting to read the boot configuration data.

The root cause of this issue is that you are building x64 system but your PXE boot/DP has no x86 WinPE WIM. Even on x64 systems x64 WinPE requires a boot loader from x86 version. Once you publish it the problem should disappear.

How to add packages to the distribution point using PowerShell

March 26th, 2014

This script should be executed on the primary site server

$sitecode = “XYZ”
$nameSpace = “root\sms\site_XYZ”
$sitename = “XYZ GmbH”
$newBDPName=”servername”

$ListOfPackages = @{“XYZ000001″,”XYZ00002″}

if ($ListOfPackages -ne $null) {
foreach ($packageID in $ListOfPackages) {
$NewDistPointForPackage = @{
PackageID = $packageID;
ServerNALPath = “[`"Display=\\$newBDPName\`"]MSWNET:[`"SMS_SITE=$sitecode`"]\\$newBDPName\”;
SiteCode = $sitecode;
SiteName=$sitename;
SourceSite = $sitecode;
ResourceType = “Windows NT Server”
}
Set-WmiInstance -class SMS_DistributionPoint -arguments $NewDistPointForPackage -namespace $nameSpace
}
}

Serge Chegorian's System Center Blog

Serge Chegorian's System Center Blog