Hi all,
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I initially thought this issue was resolved, but it is not. I've made additional posts below detailing what I've done
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We recently upgraded from Configuration Manager 2012 SP1 CU3 to Configuration Manager 2012 R2 CU1 and immediately began having problems with OS deployment. Most of the problems were easy to fix (like needing to update our MDT boot images and change our task sequences so that they use the R2 client instead of the SP1 client), but one issue was very difficult to identify and resolve.
We have a lot of Lenovo W540 and Dell Precision M4700 laptops. We are using the latest official driver packs from Lenovo and Dell for these models, and everything worked fine while we were on SP1 CU3. After upgrading to R2, these two models started failing
OS deployment. The symptoms varied, but typically included a corrupt Segoe UI font:
We would also see these errors while setting up the Configuration Manager client during the task sequence:
"This application requires one of the following versions of the .NET Framework: v4.0.30319 Do you want to install this .NET Framework version now?"
So since this was only occuring on two specific models, I assumed it was driver related (even though the exact same drivers had worked in SP1). I initially disabled the steps that install drivers for the W540 and M4700 and just added a step to install their network drivers. Without the machine-specific drivers loaded, OSD worked, but I had to manually load drivers after it finished, which was not ideal. I concluded there must be some sort of conflict with something new in the R2 CU1 client and one of the drivers, but narrowing down which driver was causing the problem was too time consuming, so I gave up on it.
I tried using a base OS image that was not built using Configuration Manager, so it wouldn't have any version of the CM client in it. This worked fine, even with all the drivers enabled. I also tried using one of my old base OS images that had the SP1 CU3 client in it, and this also worked. So that made me suspect the 2012 R2 CU1 client was to blame for sure.
I finally tried re-building my base OS images using the 2012 R2 client, but without CU1 (I just removed the PATCH= argument from the "Setup Windows and ConfigMgr" step and re-ran the build and capture task sequence). This worked fine, and is the solution I'm settling on. I can still include the PATCH= argument when I deploy this newly-captured base image.
I don't know the full root cause, but it appears to be some sort of conflict with the device drivers used by these two specific models and something included in CU1. I suspect one of the drivers tries to upgrade .NET framework while a reboot is in progress, or something like that, but that's as far as I got.
I hope this helps someone else, or if you have any ideas on what's broken, I'd love to hear about it.
--Russel Riley