So, I’ve been working on some MDT 2010 work for various customers for about six months or so, but I finally found something that struck me as sort of odd and blog-worthy.
So I created this big long involved task sequence for a customer and they attempted to lay it down over some older server installs in their lab and ran into errors. The errors were generic 80004005 errors as seen below, along with DiskPart errors:
Since the drive hasn’t been setup, I frankly wasn’t sure where to look for logging information to be honest. No MININT directory when the drive isn’t formatted you know?
So, I sat and thought for a moment. What could make my C: not present? Something in the diskpart command. But what? As I sat pondering it, I went back over my task sequence in my head (I didn’t have access to the console at the time).
One thing we had done, was specified larger drives for C: (they were moving from 2003 images to 2008 R2, and 2008 R2 requires a larger footprint on the disk). The disks for the old system were likely setup in the SCSI RAID controller for the local machine. Which means from WinPEs’ view, it’s a drive right. So I looked in diskpart after hitting F8 here and look what I saw:
Sure enough, disk 0 is 15 gig, my task sequence is configured to format the 1st disk to a 50 gig C: partition and then carve out the rest for D:.
Disks re-configured in the SCSI controller to one big fat disk and viola, everything works.