Clients can't connect to MDT Deployment Share

[Harry_Greatorex]

Morning guys,

 

I seem to have a major issue with our deployment server. Last Friday I imported new drivers to the driver pool for some new PC's we bought. Since then, ANY PC which we deploy to, won't find the LAN driver, we have to manually add it off USB for it to continue the deployment. This happens for old computers which we haven't touched the drivers for. The new computers don't get the LAN drivers either. So today I updated the boot images, and now when I boot into MDT and type in the deployment share UNC path, and my domain credentials, it comes up with a message saying "Invalid Credentials: Network location cannot be reached". I have tried my own personal credentials, which have domain admin rights, and the actual domain administrator account, same error every time. Anybody got any ideas? At the moment, we can't image any of our new PC's, or even any of our old ones. I have even set up a new deployment share and tried connecting to that, with the same results.

 

Regards

Harry

[Mustang]

Sounds like your lan driver isn't in your boot image, at the mdt login box press shift+f10 (i think) this will open a command prompted, run ipconfig /all to see if you have a network connection/ip

[Harry_Greatorex]

Interesting. As i mentioned, none of our drivers, new or old have been removed, only added. Ive put our driver discs in and tried reimporting, but no drivers get imported as they already exist. I tried what you suggested and it doesn't give me an IP address, im guessing that means it has no drivers? Even though the drivers are on the server boot images regenerated?

[themightymrp]

Do you separate your drivers out into sub-folders in MDT based upon machine model? If so you could delete the new ones from the database and regenerate the images? Or failing that, sort by date added and delete them.

[Harry_Greatorex]

No i don't have them sorted by model. I started the job after MDT was installed and configured and everything was just dumped in the root. I have just re-added all the drivers off the discs and i still have the same issue.

[themightymrp]

Have you tried the option to completely re-generate the boot image instead of doing the optimized version? I've had issues before where completely regenerating them (which can take a while) fixes various issues. Are you also replacing the boot images in WDS to take advantage of your newly integrated drivers?

[Harry_Greatorex]

Yes to both. It still seems to be a driver issue, i just don't see how. Nothing else on the server or network in general has changed. Very frustrating as we have new computers people are waiting for that we can't build!

[themightymrp]

Just as a check, right click on the MDT deployment share (from within the deployment toolkit) and go to properties. Under the Windows PE x86/x64 components tabs, has it got the tick box to enable all network drivers to be included in the selection profile? Because if that is unticked you will be making a boot image without drivers!!

 

Edited June 16, 2014 by themightymrp

[Harry_Greatorex]

This is what i have...looks ok to me!

 

[themightymrp]

Yep that looks good. It looks like you are running a newer version of MDT than me (still on 2010). Is there a way to sort the driver database by date added? And then delete the ones you imported on Friday?

[Harry_Greatorex]

We are on MDT 2012 here. There is, but also drivers that i have re-added since then as well.

[abaumber]

We have seen this where there is a conflict between drivers. Try making a selection profile that only uses one set of network drivers to try to pinpoint the erroneous driver.

[Harry_Greatorex]

How would i go about doing that? Sorry i'm very new to WDS/MDT.

[Harry_Greatorex]

Right i have removed all the new drivers i added the other week, so im left with what we had before, i have regenerated boot images and re-added them into WDS, but the problem still persists.

[themightymrp]

So it lets you boot into WinPE but then doesn't have network connection? Correct?

[Harry_Greatorex]

Yep, it gets to the part where i have to type in the credentials to connect to the network share and then errors when i type them in.

[themightymrp]

Hmm, when I've had network driver issues before it doesn't get as far as the logon box in WinPE. It errors BEFORE then with a failure to connect to deploymentshare.

 

On the login screen, if you press F8 to get a command prompt, are you able to do an ipconfig and see what you have?

[Harry_Greatorex]

Yep, see the error below.

 

[Harry_Greatorex]

Sorry i didn't see the last part of your post. Doing ipconfig /all just brings up "Windows IP Configuration" and nothing else.

[TG_MI]

It sounds like you're not getting an IP then. Have you tried booting on a different piece of hardware - one that perhaps has a different ethernet card? Just judging by what you've written so far, it sounds like you may have introduced a non-working driver into your boot image, but that shouldn't effect ALL hardware, only hardware with the ethernet controller that suddenly prefers the bunk driver.

 

I'd also try getting back to basics - on a working system that's on your domain, drop to command line and ping your deployment server. If you get replies, next try this from command line,

 

net use * "\\YOURDEPLOYMENTSERVERNAME\deploymentshare$"

 

If you can connect to it, then that at least tells you that there's nothing wrong with your sever or deploymentshare from a network perspective or a windows share/permissions perspective. Then you can safely turn your focus back onto your drivers within MDT, regenerate your boot images, and so forth.

[Harry_Greatorex]

Well it's all working now... turns out the drivers that were provided with the NEW PC's were Windows 8.1 drivers, not windows 7, and as MDT 2012 doesn't support 8.1, it corrupted the driver database! Asked my supplier for Win7 Drivers and it worked no problem!

[themightymrp]

Chuff me!