We are having issues with MDT during the step of "Partitioning and formatting". On a non-regular basis the device just stops during this step without any errors or notifications. Some extra details The server is installed on a HP server which contains Hyper-V and on this a MDT server. We are using Windows Server 2019 We are using MDT 6.3.8456.1000 We are installing Windows 10 We are using F12 to startup the installation process The notebooks we have seen the issues on are Lenovo G1 and G2 notebooks. We have tried it with "Secure Boot" on and off inside the BIOS no difference We have tried to set BIOS to "UEFI" and "BIOS" We have checked the log on a device when this is hanging and couldn't see any strange errors/warnings When a device crashes, you can shutdown the system and try it again, and normally it then works just fine We have taken the server and notebooks from our customer to our side. We have started the notebooks (3 of them) for about 50 times and only have seen it once. While our customer reports on a regular basis that one of the devices is failing. Any clue what we could do to find out the root cause of this issue?

This is weird issue specially when you have no error message. Is this happen only in Lenovo devices? If yes, check with Lenovo support. Check if there is any new firmware or BIOS update for Lenovo.

MDT hangs during partitioning and format

vd Sanden 1

We are having issues with MDT during the step of "Partitioning and formatting". On a non-regular basis the device just stops during this step without any errors or notifications.

Some extra details

The server is installed on a HP server which contains Hyper-V and on this a MDT server.
We are using Windows Server 2019
We are using MDT 6.3.8456.1000
We are installing Windows 10
We are using F12 to startup the installation process
The notebooks we have seen the issues on are Lenovo G1 and G2 notebooks.
We have tried it with "Secure Boot" on and off inside the BIOS no difference
We have tried to set BIOS to "UEFI" and "BIOS"
We have checked the log on a device when this is hanging and couldn't see any strange errors/warnings
When a device crashes, you can shutdown the system and try it again, and normally it then works just fine

We have taken the server and notebooks from our customer to our side.
We have started the notebooks (3 of them) for about 50 times and only have seen it once.
While our customer reports on a regular basis that one of the devices is failing.

Any clue what we could do to find out the root cause of this issue?

1 answer

Reza-Ameri 16,981 Reputation points

2021-08-04T13:59:22.167+00:00

This is weird issue specially when you have no error message.
Is this happen only in Lenovo devices?
If yes, check with Lenovo support.
Check if there is any new firmware or BIOS update for Lenovo.
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vd Sanden 1 Reputation point

2021-08-04T14:59:00.463+00:00

Thanks for your quick reply. I just checked with the customer and they can confirm that more devices are having these issues, so not only Lenovo.

Reza-Ameri 16,981 Reputation points

2021-08-05T16:24:02.67+00:00

Do you have Windows installed on those devices?
Have you tried updating firmware or BIOS?
Are they using HDD or SSD hard disk?

vd Sanden 1 Reputation point

2021-08-06T09:11:18.89+00:00

We now have one HP system which contantly has this issue..

First time it got stuck when on message "Preparing partition 1....", while looking at the logging the last line was "Preparing partition 2...." .
The second time its hanging on message"Preparing partition 2...".

Regarding your questions:

It has Windows installed (several times via the same MDT server, which worked fine)

BIOS isn't checked/updated yet, because it did work this week several times up until now

This HP device has a SSD disk.

For some reason during testing we created a issue for this HP (not for the other notebooks) that it during startup couldn't mount the DeploymentShare.
Some tip on the internet was to run DISKPART with the DISK 0 and CLEAN command, this made it again possible to run the deployment again.
But since this moment we have the issue that this device is hanging during the partitioning.

We also tried to run the samen DISKPART commands on the Lenovo device, but this didn't trigger the device to hang during installation.
We thought that we had found a way to reproduce the issue, but that doesn't seem to be true.

No idea what the root cause is.

vd Sanden 1 Reputation point

2021-08-06T11:25:28.183+00:00

Just had one run in which it was working successfully. But now again stuck at Update progress [ 16 ]: Preparing partition 2... based on the log but on screen Preparing partition 1. I have added extra log lines inside ZTIUtility.vbs, above Call oProgress.ShowActionProgress(oEnvironment.Item("_SMSTSOrgName"), oEnvironment.Item("_SMSTSPackageName"), oEnvironment.Item("_SMSTSCustomProgressDialogMessage"), oEnvironment.Item("_SMSTSCurrentActionName"), (uStep), (uMaxStep), sMsg, (iPercent), (iMaxPercent)) and below. But it looks like this function stops the entire process.

vd Sanden 1 Reputation point

2021-08-06T14:19:22.73+00:00

We found had the issue again with the notebook and did get some steps further.
It was waiting while loading oEnvironment.Item("_SMSTSCustomProgressDialogMessage").
We found out that this sometimes is waiting for a lock of C:\MININT\SMSOSD\OSDLOGS\VARIABLES.DAT.LOCK.
The function GetDAT inside Environment is waiting for it with:

If Ucase(oUtility.ScriptName) <> "LTICLEANUP" Then sLockFile = PersistPath & "\" & PersistFile & ".LOCK" On error resume next Set fLock = nothing Set fLock = oFSO.CreateTextFile(sLockFile, 2, true) Do while fLock is nothing dLastModified = 0 ' FORCE a rescan. ' ologging.CreateEntry sLockFile & " is locked by another process, Wait!", LogTypeVerbose oUtility.SafeSleep 10 Set fLock = oFSO.CreateTextFile( sLockFile, 2, true) Loop On error goto 0 End if

So when the device was hanging on this step again, we noticed that the folder C:\MININT\SMSOSD\OSDLOGS didn't exist.
When we created this folder, the proces automatically continued.

We noticed that when we enabled ologging.CreateEntry sLockFile & " is locked by another process, Wait!", LogTypeVerbose our problem didn't occur because it most probably automatically created this folder. We don't know yet why the C:\MININT\SMSOSD\OSDLOGS folder isn't created. Specially because it doesn't happen randomly.

Reza-Ameri 16,981 Reputation points

2021-08-06T15:12:49.713+00:00

Thank you for sharing, I advise you to take all these log files and findings (even this post) and submit a bug report in the Feedback Hub app in Windows 10, so the product team would be able to investigate.
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