Windows Deployment Services (WDS) is a service role that allows you to deploy the Windows operating system to a PXE-enabled client. and allows you to deploy a Windows operating system to multiple clients at the same time. See this article on how to set up and install the WDS role. If you are using Oracle VirtualBox, you may encounter an error: “No bootable media found system halted: Unable to PXE boot WDS to Virtualbox, see this article for a fix“.
During installation, you will notice the following error during the task sequence selection “The Operating System is missing”. This error was prompted because the Windows Operating System was not selected in the task sequence and as such, the Windows installation would not proceed. In this article, we also discussed the consequence of not selecting the “operating system to install” via the task sequence.
To resolve this issue, you will have to launch the Open the Deployment Share and perform the following steps below.
– Expand on the Deployment share
– Select Task Sequence
– Select properties and when the task sequence opens up
– Select the Task Sequence Menu bar on the top as shown below
Next, scroll down to the following area under “Install” as shown below,
– Select “Install Operating System”
– On the right pane of the window, under properties
– Click on browse under the “Operating system to install” and select the install.wim file.
When this is done, click on apply and ok. Now, you can now continue with you windows 10 or server installation and it will complete successfully. See related Windows 10 deployment via WDS, how to set up a VM via PXE boot on a Generation 1 VM – Hyper-V and how to set up a VM via PXE boot on a Generation 2 VM – Hyper-V.
Lastly, also ensure, on the properties window of the Task Sequence, the unattended.xml is pointing to the right image as well. Follow the steps below to perform this step.
- Under the OS Info
- Edit the unattended XML file and
- Ensure the "under the Answer file" window
- The Operating System points to the right OS.
- Validate and save the Answer File. For more information on this step, see how to configure and deploy Windows using Microsoft Deployment Toolkit, and Windows Deployment Services for Windows 10. You may be interested in the following articles below.
WDS configuration interacts closely with DHCP, PXE, DNS, and Active Directory. As all of these functions are part of the Windows Server platform. See the following links for more details on DHCP. IP assignment via Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP), how to install Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol on Windows Server 2019, and how to configuring DHCP: Post-deployment of Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol.
I hope you found this blog post helpful. If you have any questions, please let me know in the comment session.