Intermittent problem with formatting and SCCM

Question

Hello, I've been using SCCM for some time to setup our dell workstations. I have constantly been running into this intermittent problem where after the partition/format step finishes in SCCM that I receive a task sequence 0x80070057 failure immediately after the formatting. When I reboot the machien and push F8 to bring up the command window. I try to access C: and I notice that the volume is corrupted. If I reboot it may or may not pass this step and continue onto the OS installation. This happens on ALL SYSTEMS. It's not everytime though it's totally intermittent. To test my theory I created a diskpart script that simulates the same thing as my SCCM OSD step. select disk 0 clean create partition primary select partition 1 format fs=ntfs label='Windows' quick override assign letter=c active Often the script fails af the format step and the screen reads: 'DiskPart has encountered an error: The parameter is incorrect. See the System Event Log for more information. I can't find the system event log in WinPE and doubt one exists. If I rerun this script again or a few more times it eventually formats correctly. It may even work 10 times before it fails. As you can see this is a major pain though because when I have techs in the field reimaging machines it could fail at anytime forcing me to sometimes 're-advertise' my OSDs. What gives? I've been having this problem for about a year now. I have a large deployment coming up and I'm trying to avoid this issue. I'm tried doing a manual format instead of with diskpart and it even bombs out intermittently and tells me that the disk is RAW. I would assume that I need to do a full format each time and that may fix things but it works without it, and i've never been forced to do a full on any system. Anyone have any idea what causes this?

hilmarusd · Answer

Sorry, but this reply isn't an actual solution but more of a "I'm having the same problem and found a workaround but want to really fix it..."

I've found that certain machines will always format the drive and go through the whole process but won't boot afterwards because the drive is in RAW format and not NTFS. This varies between systems and I have yet to find a commonality.

What I did to circumvent this problem on the machines I know will fail is to disable the disk formatting step in the task sequence and press F8 to get to a command prompt before the sequence starts. I then format the drive myself as NTFS and then select the task sequence I want to deploy.

If I figure out why this is happening, I will re-post my solution. For now, I have 3 pallets of computers totaling to over 120 units and they need to get out the door. I wish just once I could solve a problem with the best possible scenario instead of just getting the job done!

Enterprise Client

Was this post helpful?