5 / 5 ( 2 votes )

Players,

Last week I was asked to look into PXE boot issue that a friend of mine was experiencing, in his own words he explained that “PXE boots were working fine until” … he recently built a new Windows 2008 R2 box (No idea why he didn’t use 2012 R2 …).

It wasn’t a boundary group issue, as this problem was intermittent. And was sometimes fixed reboot of the server.

He passed over a bunch of log files, and the following error stuck out.

Log Name: Application

Source: WDSServer

Event ID: 512

Task Category: WDSServer

Description:

An error occurred while trying to initialize provider WdsImgSrv from C:\Windows\system32\WdsImgSrv.dll. Since this provider is not marked as critical, Windows Deployment Services server will continue.

As well as this …

Log Name: Application

Source: WDSIMGSRV

Event ID: 258

Task Category: WdsImgSrv

Level: Error

Description:

An error occurred while trying to initialize the Windows Deployment Services image server.

And this …

System Log: The Windows Deployment Services Server service terminated unexpectedly

and finally …

An error occurred while trying to initialize provider WdsImgSrv from C:\Windows\system32\WdsImgSrv.dll. Since this provider is not marked as critical, Windows Deployment Services server will continue. Error Information: 0xC1030136

So after a bit of Google’ing I found these 2 links that pointed me to the issue …

http://blogs.technet.com/b/configurationmgr/archive/2015/03/19/kb-configuration-manager-pxe-boot-causes-windows-deployment-services-to-crash.aspx

and

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/3046055

There is no fix the Workaround provided is as follows. (I took this straight from the second link provided above)

Configure the Configuration Manager WDS provider to be single-threaded instead of multithreaded. This will limit WDS processing of PXE requests to one at a time and will prevent the second, duplicate PXE request from conflicting with the original request. To configure the Configuration Manager WDS provider for single-threading, create the NumberOfThreadsregistry key with a DWORD value of 1 in the following location:

Configuration Manager 2007 32bit WDS server: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\SMS\PXE

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\SMS\PXE Configuration Manager 2007 64bit WDS server: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\SMS\PXE

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\SMS\PXE Configuration Manager 2012 DP/WDS server:HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\SMS\DP Doing this does not typically affect server performance for PXE requests except in environments where a large number of PXE requests are performed on a consistent basis. In these environments, we recommend that you use the first workaround.

He tried this and PXE boots are running again, I cant say if this will 100% cure his problems, but it normally failed after about 2-3 days and its been a week now and all is still well. So fingers crossed hey …

Enjoy,

Heinrich

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