OS Deployment Windows 8.1 SCCM 2012 R2/MDT 2013 not displaying progress background after Winpe phase

[Mani_Aira]

Hello All!

 

This is my first time on this forum and may I take this opportunity to say that it's one of the best sites I visit to troubleshoot SCCM issues over the years, it's truly been a godsend! :-)

 

Firstly, my environment:

 

SCCM 2012 R2 Site

 

MDT 2013 Integration.

 

Server 2012

 

I basically use MDT for the UDI Wizard and Computer Naming ONLY. My issue is that during the initial part of the Windows 8.1 build the usual MDT background is displayed with the 5 arrows in the top right hand corner showing what stage the build is at. It shows "System Backup" arrow while performing a User State Capture and then shows the "Install Image" arrow when the Windows 8.1 image is being downloaded and applied. However, when SCCM applies the Config Manager Client during the Windows Setup phase the system restarts into Windows...Not Winpe..... (which is fine and normal), the MDT Toolkit package runs happily afterwards and sets the background image to "Windows Setup"...Well...tries to set the background!........ but the background progress image no longer runs for the rest of the entire build process even though I run the MDT toolkit package after every reboot thereafter and run the MDT script to enable the progress background. I have run the ZTISetBackground.wsf manually from an F8 command prompt during the build process and I get an error "Unable to find WindowHide.exe, exiting". I have Googled this error and every path leads me to a dead end. I have checked for this WindowsHide.exe and it IS present in the MDT Toolkit Package.

 

I will state that the MDT backgrounds show up all the way through a Windows 7 64 Bit build Task Sequence no problem.......but for some reason it does not like being displayed on Windows 8.1 during a task sequence build when it comes out of the Winpe phase. All I get is the normal SCCM progress box and a blank screen in the background.

 

Any help would be really appreciated.

 

Mani :-)

[anyweb]

hi and welcome !

what we need to troubleshoot this is your smsts.log file, you'll find it in c:\windows\ccm\smstslog\smsts.log when it fails

[Mani_Aira]

Hi there Niall,

 

Thank you for your response. I will take a look at the logs and paste the relevant clip on here. I do believe that the error relates to the WindowHide.exe file in MDT which is present in the MDT package. However, I will not assume this is the problem and will paste the log today. Hopefully I will get to the bottom of this soon.

 

Thank you for your quick response! Much appreciated!

 

:-)

[Mani_Aira]

Hi there! I have attached the log file and I see no errors at all relating to the MDT background being applied. I'm so confused. I ran a rebuild today, it still did NOT show the MDT Progress background after the Winpe phase as described above but this time there are NO Windowhide.exe errors in the log. :-(

 

<![LOG[Action command line: smsswd.exe /run: cscript.exe "%deployroot%\scripts\ztisetbackground.wsf" /image:4]LOG]!><time="11:26:25.918-60" date="06-03-2014" component="TSManager" context="" type="1" thread="2440" file="tsxml.cpp:522">
<![LOG[Adding instruction at 37]LOG]!><time="11:26:25.918-60" date="06-03-2014" component="TSManager" context="" type="1" thread="2440" file="tsxml.cpp:524">
<![LOG[
Parsing step node: Dell Bios Utility]LOG]!><time="11:26:25.918-60" date="06-03-2014" component="TSManager" context="" type="1" thread="2440" file="tsxml.cpp:459">

 

As you can see in the logs it just runs then goes onto the install of the Dell Bios Utility, but the background during the build process is blank.

 

I guess I will need to spend more time looking into this as we do not have much to go on at the moment......sorry everyone :-(

[anyweb]

where is the log file ? i dont see it anywhere