WDS not installing when PXE enabled on the DP


Some strange going-ons with SCCM 2012 R2.

For some reason the WDS role was not installing when enabling PXE for the local distribution point. I checked the distmgr.log and nothing was happening.

I manually installed the WDS role from Server Manager – not the recommdend way – but WDS failed to start. Checking Event Viewer the following error appeared:

‘The Windows Deployment Services Server service terminated with service-specific error This shared resource does not exist..’

I checked the SCCM server and no ‘Remoteinstall’ folder had been created.

Running any wdsutil command in an elevated command prompt just returned the error:

‘Error Description: The Deployment Server role service for Windows Deployment Services has not been configured on the server.’

To get around the problem I ran the following command:

‘wdsutil /initialize-server /REMINST:c:\remoteinstall’

The WDS service is now running and the remoteinstall folder exists.

3 comments

  1. Yeah, this is old, but still came up as one of the first results when i searched for it so I decided to leave a comment.

    I’ve run into this problem on a DP with only 1 disk. Normally i have OS on C: and SMS data on D: but this was just a test server so didn’t bother to create the D: drive.

    WDS failed to install with similar issue as above until i disabled UAC.

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