Deployment failing - log locations?

I'm trying to fumble my way through learning MDT 2010 since they guy who set it up is out of town until next Wednesday. I understand the basic concepts, but I'm not experienced with it by any means.

The problem I'm having is that deployment is failing on some PCs but not others. I have one desktop that will image just fine everytime. But I have a couple others that error out. They make it through the initial stage where it says installing operating system, injecting drivers, applying image, etc. Then when it reboots into PE the second time it errors out saying it can't map a drive to the deployment share/network name cannot be found.

Why would it perform the first half of the deployment and then say it can't find the share after reboot? And why on some PCs but not others? I've been googling for logs to check but haven't found any with useful info. Are there any you would suggest checking?

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BADfish10

xenodamus wrote: »

I'm trying to fumble my way through learning MDT 2010 since they guy who set it up is out of town until next Wednesday. I understand the basic concepts, but I'm not experienced with it by any means.

The problem I'm having is that deployment is failing on some PCs but not others. I have one desktop that will image just fine everytime. But I have a couple others that error out. They make it through the initial stage where it says installing operating system, injecting drivers, applying image, etc. Then when it reboots into PE the second time it errors out saying it can't map a drive to the deployment share/network name cannot be found.

Why would it perform the first half of the deployment and then say it can't find the share after reboot? And why on some PCs but not others? I've been googling for logs to check but haven't found any with useful info. Are there any you would suggest checking?

From memory and please bear in mind that it has been a fair while since I have touched this.
The driver that is loaded on the second boot is different than the one that is used in the initial PE environment. once the error is thrown onto the screen you should be able to hit I think (Again longtime)Shift-F10
This should give you a Command prompt where you can use Ping, notepad and the like.

First thing I would do is to ping the deployment server via IP and DNS name, If this does not work you can almost guarantee you don't have the NIC driver loaded a ipconfig will confirm this as no lan device will be listed.

If you can ping the ip and DNS it is possibly a Switch port setting, are you computers plugged into a Cisco switch ? if so try adding this line to the port the problem computer is connecting to "spanning-tree portfast" then "no shut" the interface, Reboot and have another go!

To get to the log file from the system of a hung build "Shift-F10" type in the command line type notepad and hit enter, you will get a notepad once loaded "click" file> Open and browse to x:\Windows\Panther\ setupact.log you should be able to see the issue in there.

Things to check when comparing failed builds to successful builds:
Nic's check the manufacturer model number and the Firmware revision, If you do have odds and sods manufacturers/models you will likely have to inject more drivers. remember you have 2 images so it is possible for one to start the build process but the other to fail.

Raid/SATA adapters check that they are the same on all your kit or at least close, if you have systems that build and then on first boot Blue screen go into the BIOS and make sure the SATA/Raid level is set "not" to ACHI, reboot the system and it should boot in.

Network you may notice that some computers get IP addresses instantly and other do not, this can be down to a few things Drivers/Port settings/Switch topology it can be useful to just move a patch around for testing. Another interesting thing I have seen in the past is one computer boots and build on a port fine but another dose not, this in the end turned out to be the Slow older computer had more time to get an IP lease while it was chugging along than the Fast new computer that was waiting not so patiently.

Anyway as said this is off the top of my head and from a while back but should be a good starting point.

Thanks
J

xenodamus

Thanks for all the info. Between what you gave me and all the googling, I've actually learned alot about MDT today.

I got it working a few minutes ago and I THINK the root cause was the fact that the problem PCs had USB set as the #1 boot device. I'm thinking this caused them to boot to the flash drive again after the initial OS deployment when it should have been booting to the HDD and starting the sysprep stuff. Does that make sense? I did fumble around in the ini files on the server, but I'm not confident that those changes made a difference.