Windows Deployment Services Error – The System Cannot Find the File Specified

So yesterday I was starting to get crazy with an error I was getting on my WDS virtual machine.

Murphy’s Law was taking all the action and because I needed to finish a production environment image, WDS was refusing to upload a WIM.

This was the error I was getting:

Like the error tells you, the image you’re trying to upload cannot be found/it’s there anymore. …NOT

Despite this error, and after one hour trying to understand what’s going on and googling about this issue I found out that…

It was a simple…insignificant…lake of hard disk space!

Nice…very nice….

Documentation for Windows Deployment Services in Windows Server 2008

Like always, the need for something shows us various paths…

This week after a lot of WDS issues, like always, because of the lack of knowledge, I needed to find some information about how to install a Windows Vista through WDS and not letting it add the machine to the domain.

After a lot of search and talking with ours Microsoft Technical Account Manager (TAM) he gave me this link with very good information regarding Windows Deployment Services:

WDS Role Overview

Hope you enjoy it too!

WDS Error – PXE-E55(…) port 4011

I’ve always tested WDS and MDT using VMware Workstation software.
For those familiarzed with this software, it enables you like Virtual PC or Virtual Server to run Virtual Machines inside your’s. Like for example running a Linux distro, an beta version of Windows. It’s like a sandbox for you to play with.

Today I had to install WDS and MDT on a phisical Server (HP ML310 G4) and tried to PXE boot a desktop (HP DC7800 SFF). After hitting F12 for network boot I’ve got stuck on an error never seen before:

PXE-E55: proxyDHCP service did not reply to the request on port 4011

After some googling I found out the solution and the cause of if.
VMWare has a DHCP server so you don’t need to install it on any machine (the WDS machine for example).
In the case of this phisical server, I had to install WDS and a DHCP Server on Windows 2008.
In this case, for this to work you need to:

- On the WDS+DHCP machine, open registry editor and navigate to:
HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\WDSServer\Providers\WDSPXE and change the value to UseDHCPPorts=0

- Then, open the command-prompt and execute the following command:
WDSUTIL /Set-Server /UseDHCPPorts:No /DHCPOption60:Yes

And everything starts to work pretty well then!