Tuesday 1 October 2013

MDT Error - Windows could not parse or process the unattend answer file for pass

So its the school holidays with a week left i decided i needed to install some new applications on the school computers and the easiest way to do that was to create a new image and roll it out using MDT 2012.

I made my image in Hyper V and installed all the latest versions of java,flash and a few other new applications that we want to use in the new school term.

All good i created it all and captured it ready for deployment, imported the WIM file into MDT and recreated my Litetouch files and then reimported them into WDS ready for PXE booting.

I have a test machine in my office that i roll out all new images to before i go ahead and do the rest of the computers, i fired it up pressed the F12 key to tell the computer to PXE boot, it connected to the server and started into the Deployment system, i then chose the new image and told it to begin.

All went well until the computer rebooted after seeing the screen ( Setting up your computer fo rthe first time) then this error appeared.

Windows could not parse or process unattend answer file [C:\windows\Panther\unattend.xml] for pass [specialize]. A component or setting specified in the answer file does not exist.



I was thinking this is a little weird as nothing in the answer file MDT creates would have chenged as it was the same answer file i had used before i just updated the WIM file.

After a little digging and checking the log files i realsied that it was to do with the fact that the new image had Internet Explorer 10 installed, so i had to look through the answer file to find out where it was specified.

This took a little bit of research and trial and error but i eventually found the issue, it was basically this line of code in the asnwer file.

<IEWelcomeMsg>false</IEWelcomeMsg>

To fix this issue i simply commented out the whole line saved the xml file and then ran the deployment again, and viola it works as it should do.

So open up your answer file in either notepad or another plain text editing program and search for the line of code

<IEWelcomeMsg>false</IEWelcomeMsg>

And change it to this

<!-- <IEWelcomeMsg>false</IEWelcomeMsg> -->

If you use notepad ++ then it will automatically change the line to green to show that it has been commented out.


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