MDT 2012 and blank hard drives

[FishCustard]

Just thought I'd document this here in case anyone else comes across this curious glitch in MDT 2012, and to see if anyone has a better solution than the one I've found.

 

We were having problems imaging some new machines - they'd fail with a 'failed to service reboot request 0x80004005' error after applying the OS image and unattend.xml. The task sequence worked fine on other machines, just not these ones. We tried faffing about with drivers, added some different ones and tried again. Yay, it worked!

 

All good, right?

 

Yeah, until we tried imaging another one of the same machines with the same setup and it failed in the original way. What? It didn't make sense. Until I realised that the only thing different about the working machine was that the drive had an existing partition (created by the failed TS). This was also true of the old machines we imaged, as they had a pre-existing OS.

 

A solution is to do the following:

 

 

• When WinPE loads, press F8 to get a command prompt.
  
• Run 'diskpart', then the following commands to create and format an NTFS partition.
  

select disk 0
clean
create partition primary
select partition 1
active
format fs=ntfs quick

 

• Now restart the computer and run your TS. We found that you have to reboot, you can't just continue with the TS after creating the partition.
  

 

Not a big issue IMO, as it's very rare that you'll be imaging a completely blank disk, but I thought it worth discussing as it's apparently something of a known issue with MDT 2012.

Edited August 7, 2013 by FishCustard

[sted]

you can add partitioning details to mdt so it sorts a blank disk atm cant remember exactly how but iirc you add lines to customsettings.ini

[SHimmer45]

for adding partitions to drives

i have just used the "new computer" section in the task sequence not had any issues so far, providing i remembered to give the newly created partitions a variable name if i wanted to add anything to them