Deployment Solution

Working with Symantec last night we upgraded our 6.9 DS from SP1 to SP5. The last portion before the Symantec rep had to take off for the evening was regenerating the WinPE image so it could be updated to the remote PXE servers. When I try to regen the image it finishes Copying files to production area and then as soon as it gets to the next step (Extracting WIM image contents) the Boot Disk Creator window closes and the error shown below appears:

FYI: I get the same error attempting to regen the DOS image as well. Tested an image job off one of the remote PXE servers this morning, with what I assume is the old WinPE image, but PXE booted WinPE up fine and Ghost started but the Ghost job just keeps looping. I rebooted the DS server this morning, made sure there was enough hard drive space and verified the share permissions for eXpress. Thoughts?

This might be a little drastic, but this is what I would do.

Document all the PXE Utility settings, boot images, and the boot image settings.

Stop all the pxe related services.  

copy the  ....\express\pxe folder.

Uninstall Altiris PXE Server and Altiris PXE Manager.

Reboot.

Delete all the contents of the  ....\express\pxe folder, except the MMAccessKey.ini file.

Re-install PXE Manager first, followed by PXE Server by running PXEMgr.exe and then PXE.exe.

Re-create the Boot images and configuration settings for PXE in the Utility.

I said it was drastic.

Hope this helps.

Marco

Thanks for the reply Marco, I actually debated on that and it may be the route I go.

Here's another interesting thing I came across. I thought I would try building a new WinPE config for a test PXE image and in the process of going through the boot disk creator noticed that WMI and WSH are missing:

Talk about annoyances!

I would try to re-install the WinPE package and if that doesnt work DS.  I have had this issue before with a different SP level and re-installing DS was the only way to fix the issue.

How did you do the upgrade?  Did you install over SP1 or did you uninstall and then install SP5?

-Marco

I know it's been nothing but problems for the last two weeks trying to get this thing up to date in prep for Windows 7. Here's kind of a quick low down on what all has happened.

We tried upgrading over the top by stopping the services, renaming the SP1 Deployment Server folder and then installing the new SP version, we'd then just copy over the Scripts, Jobs, PXE, etc folders. This initial attempt locked up on the upgrading the database portion. So we cancelled it, stopped any running services, renamed the SP1 version back to Deployment Server and started the services back up and ran on the original set for about a week or so.

So this recent attempt the Symantec tech (bless his heart during all of this) took a backup of my database (which is extremely small as we don't have clients checking in we strictly use AClient for the initial image process and everything afterwards is handled via NS) and sent it to him. He upgraded the DB in his environment. We did a restore of the upgraded DB in the new Datastor, then upgraded the conole and then finally PXE. It's been kind of a nightmare.

I've been thinking all morning that the best thing to do might be uninstall everything, reboot the box and just start off fresh. Fresh database, fresh everything.

These are the upgrade steps that seem to work for me:

Backup DB

Uninstall DS

Reboot.

Clean-up the old express folder contents.

Install DS using same DB and to the same path as previous install.

This has always worked for me.  I have never had any luck installing the upgrade over an existing install.

We are doing windows 7 installs with DS 6.9 SP3.  Is there a reason you are updating to SP5?

Good luck,

Marco

We're still kind of cleaning things up but I have it imaging now, just need to get those optional components fixed w/ WinPE and I think that will fix the regenerating problem too. If everything bombs then I may just go with what you posted and start "clean".

I just started at this company last July and I'm working to get everything updated. It was previously on SP1 which had no support for 7 and I like to keep things either up to date or at worst a SP behind. This was when I thought I wouldn't run into this of course.