This week I upgraded a production environment of Configuration Manager 2012 to Service Pack 1. After the upgrade our 4 remote Distribution Points failed to service PXE. It seemed that the Windows Deployment Service was not able to start.
Looking at the local event viewers learned me that several errors like event id 257, 259 and 264 were there which pointed me to an issue described here where the Microsoft Visual C++ 2008 Redistributable on the remote distribution points were missing. Unfortunately it did not work out for me since both the x86 and x64 version of the Microsoft Visual C++ 2008 Redistributable were already in place.
Everything else was just working great and health after the upgrade was finished.
The following errors were reported in the event viewer;
[pullquote]Event id: 257Source: WDSServer
Description: An error occurred while trying to start the Windows Deployment Services server.
Error Information: 0xC107010C
[/pullquote] [pullquote] Event id: 513
Source: WDSServer
Description: An error occurred while trying to initialize provider WDSPXE from C:Windowssystem32wdspxe.dll. Windows Deployment Services server will be shutdown.
Error Information: 0xC107010C [/pullquote] [pullquote]Event id: 268
Source: WDSServer
Description: All registered providers failed to initialize. Please review the Event Log for specific error messages for each provider. Windows Deployment Server will be shutdown. [/pullquote] [pullquote]Event id: 264
Source: WDSServer
Description: An error occurred while trying to initialize provider SMSPXE. Since the provider is not marked as critical, the Windows Deployment Services server will remain started.
Error Information: 0x7F [/pullquote] [pullquote]Event id: 259
Source: WDSServer
Description: An error occurred while trying to load the module from D:SMS_DP$smsbinsmspxe.dll for provider SMSPXE. If the provider is marked as critical, the Windows Deployment Services server will be shutdown.
Error Information: 0x7F [/pullquote]
Looking in the SMS_MP_FILE_DISPATCH_MANAGER in the Component Status of the Monitoring workspace in the Configuration Manager console learned me that SMS Component Manager failed to reinstall the component on the site system because of the fact that a system shutdown was in progress (error 1115). A possible cause could be because of insufficient permissions of the system installation accounts. Strange errors which made no sence since the servers were up and running and the right permissions were all there.
To resolve this issue I followed the following steps on every Remote Distribution Point;
- Disable PXE on Distribution Point
- Disable Multicast option on Distribution Point
- Check if the Windows Deployment Services are successfully removed from the Remote Distribution Point
- Remove RemoteInstall folder
- Enable PXE on the Distribution Point
- Check via the event viewer that the Windows Deployment Services is successfully installed
- Enable Multicast option on Distribution Point
- Check in the RemoteInstall folder if the boot images are copied to the SMSImages folder and that the bootloader files are copied to the SMSBoot folder.
- Enable the option Allow this distribution point to respond to incoming PXE requests
- Test PXE by starting a deployment via PXE.
After these steps everything was all healthy and working again. Haven’t seen this issue during earlier installs but when you run into this issue you now know how to resolve it 😉