Thursday 9 October 2014

SCCM 2012 PXE Boot "PXE-E32 PXE Timeout" Windows Deployment Services (WDS) "The Windows Deployment Server service terminated with the following service-specific error: This shared resource does not exist"

After installing SCCM 2012 SP1 CU5 PXE boot is no longer working, when you attempt to boot a client you receive the following "PXE-E32 PXE Timeout" error. On investigation it is because the Windows Deployment Services (WDS) service is not running on the Distribution Point (DP), when you try to manually start this you get the following error  "The Windows Deployment Server service terminated with the following service-specific error: This shared resource does not exist".
The first step is to disabled PXE on the Distribution Point this can be done from the Properties pane of the Distribution Point by unticking the Enable PXE support for clients from the PXE tab.

This process will attempt to remove WDS from the server to ensure that it is completely removed use the following PowerShell command;
Uninstall-WindowsFeature WDS -Restart

When the server starts now try to reconfigure the Distribution Point for WDS, you do this by simply ticking the Enable PXE Support for Clients option. 

To confirm that WDS has been reinstalled and configured using the following PowerShell command;
Get-WindowsFeature *wds*


At this point I tried to start the Windows Deployment Services service again and it still failed, I then began to think this could be related to the RemoteInstall folder that is provisioned as part of SCCM/MDT.

When I checked the RemoteInstall folder it was configured as Not Shared, which did not seem right as this was where clients were directed to download boot images from.

My next step was to use the following command from an Administrative Command Prompt;
WDSUTIL /Initialize-Server /Reminst:"C:\RemoteInstall"


After this command completed successfully it restored the share configuration on the RemoteInstall folder. Now the Windows Deployment Server service started correctly.

This then allowed me to start the WDS service and clients could PXE boot.