Tag: WDS

During the deployment roadshow me and Johan did recently a recurring question was if it is possible to set the default boot image in WDS if one have multiple boot images.

Well of course you can set it, just go to Properties for the WDS server and go to the boot tab and choose a default boot image for the architecture you want to set a default image. Note: This sets the default boot image to the one you choose but you will still be able to choose another boot image in the list of boot images.

The other week I stumbled across a very interesting fact, a fact that the Windows Deployment Server service refused to start on a clean installed Windows Server 2008 R2. After troubleshooting for a whole day, even reinstalling the OS, reproducing the error even without any patches seemed very strange. The WDS service is a service that normally just works. The following error was logged:

Log Name: Application
Source: WDSServer
Date: 2010-10-04 17:14:23
Event ID: 257
Task Category: WDSServer
Level: Error
Keywords: Classic
User: N/A
Computer: wds.contoso.com
Description:
An error occurred while trying to start the Windows Deployment Services server.
Error Information: 0xFFFFFBB3

An important fact is that the server to be used for deployments was a retired yet powerful TS/RDS server with two six core processors using hyper threading, making it 24 logical processors.  Not likely to be the hardware specs of a regular deployment server but hey, it can obviously be scenarios where this might be an issue. Thanks goes to a colleague (Jeanette) who figured out that we could try to set the number of logical processors being used to two. Guess what, after a reboot the WDS service started just fine!

To change the number of used processors we used:

bcdedit /set {current} numproc 2

To revert this change you could use:

bcdedit /deletevalue {current} numproc

After some work with Microsoft Product Services and Support it appears to be a bug nevertheless. The limit for the number of logical processors you can have for the WDS service to start is 20. Bear this in mind…

There is a bug in Windows Deployment Services (WDS) in Windows Server 2008 R2 which prevents your pre-staged computers from booting via PXE. In the Event logs on the WDS server you can find event 519 stating that there are duplicate machines with the same GUID or MAC address, even though this is not true. There is a hotfix for this problem which is available from http://support.microsoft.com/kb/2028840/en-us.

The event looks like:

Log Name: Application
Source: BINLSVC
Date: 2010-09-24 10:29:04
Event ID: 519
Task Category: BINLSVC
Level: Error
Keywords: Classic
User: N/A
Computer: wds1.contoso.local
Description:
Multiple machine accounts with the same GUID or MAC address were found in Active Directory Domain Services. The Windows Deployment Services server will use the first listed machine account.

List of matching machines: CN=DEPLOYTEST1,OU=CONTOSO,DC=stenis,DC=local