Configuration Manager PXE Service Point Errors
I recently had a look at an issue with the Configuration Manager PXE Service Point running on a test environment of mine. I couldn't get any of my operating system images to deploy - in fact I couldn't get the PXE boot to complete successfully. In the smspxe.log file I was getting the following messages:
No Boot Action for Device (38) found
ProcessDatabaseReply: No Advertisement found in Db for device
I found this a little odd, as the machine definitely had a task sequence advertised against it, and my custom WinPE image had been made available for PXE.
Digging in the event log, I was getting error messages when WDS started up, saying:
Source: WDSIMGSRV
Category: WdsImgSrv
Event ID: 258
Description: An error occurred while trying to initialize the Windows Deployment Services image server. Error information 0xC1030104
A little cryptic, and not exactly obvious what it meant. Having a dig around, it appears that 0xC1030104 actually means that the WDSServer is not configured. Strange, I thought the Configuration Manager PXE Service Point setup did that? I checked all the appropriate logs (pxesetup.log, pxemsi.log) and everything seemed in order. I decided to try and initialise the server at the command line to see if that made a different. I ran:
wdsutil /initialize-server /REMINST:"D:\remoteinstall"
where D:\remoteinstall was the directory that Configuration Manager had configured WDS to use. Sure enough, as soon as I did that, PXE started working perfectly.