SCCM/WDS PXE Boot Fails with "The details below show the information relating to the PXE boot request for this computer. Please provide these details to your Windows Deployment Services Administrator so that this request can be approved" and "Pending Request ID: x Please wait. SMS is looking for policy PXE Boot Aborted"

When you try to PXE Boot a new (unknown) computer you get "The details below show the information relating to the PXE boot request for this computer. Please provide these details to your Windows Deployment Services Administrator so that this request can be approved.", this is followed on by another error "Pending Request ID: x Please wait. SMS is looking for policy PXE Boot Aborted".

I checked in the SMSPXE.log file and it appears the issue was caused by the new computer being unknown by SCCM. It states "device is not in the database.".

From the Configuration Manager console browse to the All Unknown Computers collection from Assets and Compliance\Overview\Devices\All Unknown Computers highlight the Unknown Computer object which is x64 in this instance and use the Add Selected Items button and click Add Selected Items to Existing Device Collection.

From the Select Collection window choose a collection that has Task Sequences advertised/deployed to it and drop the unknown computer into there.

Try the PXE Boot again and it should have resolved the issue.

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.

WDS/MDT Integration (DHCP Option 60,66,67): "PXE-E55: ProxyDHCP Service did not reply to request on port 4011" Client Fails to PXE Boot

You have deployed Windows Deployment Services (WDS) and the Microsoft Deployment Toolkit (MDT) to a new Virtual Machine on your Corporate subnet. You have configured WDS to use the MDT Boot Images to allow for PXE Booting over the Network.

When you try and PXE Boot from a client it timesout and fails with PXE-E55: ProxyDHCP Service did not reply to request on port 4011. I did some investigation around the WDS installation and the Boot Images although it seemed to keep coming back to the DHCP configuration in place.

 

I checked the DHCP Options for the Subnet in which I was working to ensure Option 66 Boot Server Host Name and Option 67 Bootfile Name were configured correctly. Everthing was as expected Option 66 was pointing to the IPv4 Address of the new MDT/WDS Server and 67 was pointing to \Boot\x64\wdsbdp.com (resides in RemoteInstall on the local disk). again as expected.

 

 

After some further research it turns out the Option 60 Class ID can cause issues when PXE Booting. In this instance it was a production environment with some stale configurations. Option 60 was configured with the string "PXEClient". This apparently is telling the DHCP Clients that the target of Option 66 is a PXE Client and not a PXE Server. I edited Option 60 and cleared the field and restarted the DHCP Server.

 

I also restarted WDS and then attemtped to PXE Boot again, it started to work. The gotcha here is that when I tried to remove Option 60 ClassID completely from the Scope Options I did not correct the issue. Therefore Option 60 had to be present with no string in the field.

 

SCCM 2012 R2 PXE Boot: The details below show the information relating to the PXE boot request for this computer. Please provide these details to your Windows Deployment Services Administrator so that this request can be approved. The Boot Configuration Data for your PC is missing or contains errors. File: \boot\bcd Error Code: 0xc000000f

SCCM 2012 R2 PXE Boot is failing, the target device gets an IP address from DHCP and appears to make a connection although it fails with the error The details below show the information relating to the PXE boot request for this computer. Please provide these details to your Windows Deployment Services Administrator so that this request can be approved.

 

I opened the SMSPXE.log file from the location below, this may vary in your environment.

 

 

The Configuration Manager Trace Log Tool which can be downloaded and installed from here http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=36213 is an excellent way to read log files.

 

After some research on the following errors I decided to remove the PXE services from the Distribution Point.

 

You will notice from Server Manager than WDS is present on the local server, the following process is going to uninstall WDS.

 

From the Configuration Manager Console click on Administration and Distribution Points, and right click on the local distribution point that is causing issues in the site you are in, and select Properties.

 

 

From the Properties page, click on the PXE tab, and untick the box Enable PXE support for clients. The following warning will be displayed PXE and Multicast are no longer enabled on this distribution point. Do you want Configuration Manager to remove Windows Deployment Services from this distribution point? in this instance click Yes.

 

Allow a few minutes and check back in Server Manager you will notice WDS is no longer installed.

In this deployment of SCCM the boot images were generally untidy so I decided to remove them all by right clicking on them individually and selecting Delete.

 

Accept the warning message about removing the boot images.

 

Now the Boot Images pane shows No Items found.

The next stage is to rename (or delete but as this is a production system I prefer to rename) the RemoteInstall folder that can be found on the SCCM installation partition.

Navigate back to the Properties of the Distribution Point and renable PXE support for clients by ticking the box, SCCM will display the following warning about configuring UDP ports for your DHCP scope options. None of this has been changed so we can click Yes.

 

 

Ensure Allow this distribution point to respond to incoming PXE requests, Enable unknown computer support and Require a password when computer use PXE are all ticked. Remember to set a password that will be displayed after a client does the inital PXE boot.

This particular SCCM server has multiple Network Adapters, therefore I elected to click Respond to PXE requests on specific network interfaces, this is done by specifying the MAC Address of the interface you want clients to PXE to.

 

The getmac command can be used from Command Prompt to display all the physical addresses available to the server.

 

The next stage is now to import the boot images into the SCCM again, distribute the content, reconnect them with Task Sequences and attempt to PXE boot again. On completion of doing this the client sucessfully PXE booted. The initial error The details below show the information relating to the PXE boot request for this computer. Please provide these details to your Windows Deployment Services Administrator so that this request can be approved was resolved.

Now it appears there is corruption in the boot images themselves, after the client is PXE booted using F12, it displays the following error The Boot Configuration Data for your PC is missing or contains errors. File: \boot\bcd Error Code: 0xc000000f and the device reboots itself.

 

 

The first task was to delete all of the old Boot Images again from SCCM, to clear out any legacy issues. The second is to regenerate the images from scratch.

To regenerate the images open an Administrative - Deployment and Imaging Tools Environment from the SCCM server, this is installed as part of the ADK - Deployment Tools. Use the following commands to generate each of the new boot images, please note that both the architectures are required for this to work.

Copype.cmd amd64 C:\WinPE\x64 Copype.cmd x86 C:\WinPE\x86

 

These commands generates a WIM file in C:\WinPE\%architecture%\media\sources, these WIM files must be imported into SCCM. As SCCM only supports UNC paths for images imports share the C:\WinPE folder, giving Full Control Share Permissions and Read & execute, List folder contents and Read to the Authenticated Users principal on the NTFS/Security tab.

Open the Configuration Manager console and navigate to Software Library and then Boot Images. Click the Add Boot Image icon from the ribbon.

 

In the Path field, enter the full UNC path to the newly generated WIM file. This must be done twice, once for both x86 and x64. The Boot Image field should be set to 1 - Microsoft Windows PE (x64) click Next.

 

Name the image accordingly.

 

The repeat this process for both architectures and they should appear in the list of boot images.

 

When PXE was disabled and renamed at the beginning of this guide, the RemoteInstall folder was recreated. This was why the original RemoteInstall folder was renamed at the beginning. You will notice it is emtpy at present.

 

If this folder remains empty you will receive the following error The specified file was not found. TFTP Error - File Note Found this is because the DHCP server on the network is configured to point to this directory.

 

If you check the configuration of the DHCP server, under Scope Options you will see Option 67 Bootfile Name is configured as SMSBoot\x64\wdsnbp.com and are we know this folder is empty. Please note this can be changed to SMSBoot\x86\wdsnbp.com if required. Although the x86 folder must be populated also.

 

In SCCM 2012 you can populate these folders by right clicking and selecting Properties from the Boot Image repository. Click on the Data Source tab, and tick the Deploy this boot image from the PXE-enabled distribution point.

Ensure you do this for both x86 and x64, and click the Update Distribution Points from the ribbon.

 

This will populate the RemoteInstall\SMSBoot folder for the particular architecture.

 

Check back and you will notice the folder has been populated with the required files, notice wdsnbp.com is present which is the exact file DHCP option 67 is configured to point to.

 

Because all of the original boot images have since been deleted, but the orignal Task Sequences have not we now need to go back and retrospectively reconnect each Task Sequence with a valid boot image.

From the Configuration Manager console, browse to Software Library\Task Sequences and right click on a valid Task Sequence and select Properties.

 

From the Properties page click Advanced and ensure Use a boot image: is ticked. The Browse button can be used to browse the available boot images. Select the correct architecture and click OK.

 

 

Click OK and Distribution Content once again.

Attempt to PXE boot, and now it works!

 

SCCM 2012 R2 - Task Sequence Failed "This Task Sequence cannot be run because the program files for TSID cannot be located on a distribution point. For more information, contact your system administrator or helpdesk operator."

You have created a new Task Sequence in SCCM, from your Central Administration Site. This Task Sequence will be used to deploy an entirely new Windows 7 x64 SP1 image to client devices. In the first instance you PXE boot a new device and try and run the Task Sequence, it fails with the error This Task Sequence cannot be run because the program files for TSID cannot be located on a distribution point. For more information, contact your system administrator or helpdesk operator.

 

As the Operating System images and the Task Sequence were provisioned in on the Central Administration Site Server my first thought was that I had forgot to Distribute Content from the ribon. Therefore I went ahead and done this again to ensure it was done.

 

When this did not fix the issue immediately I looked at the Content Status of the newly created software from Monitoring/Distribution Status and it appears the Distribution Manager was still replicating the content to other sites/DP's.

 

I then clicked on View Status and it reassured me that the content is being redistributed. Although quite a bit of time passed and it still remained in the In Progress state.

 

After around 2 hours, the Content Status changed to Success and the light turned to Green. It transpired in this instance the Active Directory did not have Sites and Subnets properly defined, therefore it is my guess that this caused the of the lengthy delay.