If you’re like me. Then you’ve dealt with Microsoft Deployment Toolkit (or MDT for short) for a while. You will know the pain of the following picture as you attempt to figure out what is blocking you from accessing the share.
Very often you can go through all the settings. Verifying that the credentials stored in the boot.ini file are correct. You’ve updated your deployment share. You check the permissions to that share to make sure that you did add the user to have write access.
However, you keep randomly hitting this prompt.
After online searching I found one page (I’ve since lost but will add a link if I find it again) that mentioned time zone inside the WinPE boot.
Upon looking at this, I couldn’t get it to go because the vbs script being suggested was supposed to be at the start of the Task Sequence. But the error wasn’t letting me get that far.
A work around to get me past was bringing up the command prompt and using the Registry commands to set the time to synchronize with our server. Which was great, but it did bring an unnecessary interaction into the Task Sequence that interrupted the mostly automatic flow.
The second stage ended up being editing the Wim file that MDT uses for its boot file update. However, as you bring installs in and out of your deployment workbench, MDT changes said boot Wim and picks a different install file.
So obviously that wasn’t going to work.
The solution in the end, as it turned out, was even simpler. To edit the Windows ADK, install. When you install the Windows ADK the WinPE Wim file is default set to US Pacific time. Being in New Zealand with servers set to NZ Standard Time. This obviously wasn’t good for making connections to Active Directory based shares.
The following steps change the WinPE Wim to the correct time zone. In this example, I will be using New Zealand Standard Time. However, just change yours to the appropriate time.
Step One:
Create a folder somewhere on your MDT server. In this instance I have a D Drive for storage. So, I’ve made D:\Mount but this can be named anything you want as it is just for temporary storage.
Step Two:
Open a command prompt. I always open these as administrator just to prevent any potential access issues.
Step Three: (this is the default location of the x64 ADK wim. Adjust if you use x86). This will mount the ADK Wim file to the Mount directory you made in step one.
dism /mount-wim /wimfile:"C:\Program Files (x86)\Windows Kits\10\Assessment and Deployment Kit\Windows Preinstallation Environment\amd64\en-us\winpe.wim" /Index:1 /MountDir:d:\MountStep Four: If you get a successful mount response in the command prompt. Then enter:
dism /image:d:Mount /Set-TimeZone:"New Zealand Standard Time"Step Five: Close the Wim and save your changes.
dism /unmount-wim /mountdir:d:\Mount /commitNow that you’re done. Go back to your workbench and update\recreate your boot wims. You shouldn’t have any issues with time zone related access.
The best part about this method is that it’s very quick. It also only needs to be done whenever the Microsoft ADK is updated to a latest version. So, it will stay with these changes until you uninstall and update.
Feel free to leave a comment if you like this content. This is the first main post to this blog site, and I felt like I should start with this one because I haven’t seen anything around the internet that worked the same way this did.
Happy Deploying!