Deployment Workbench Crashes when opening the Win PE tab in properties?

Question

I'm noticing this on every machine in our facility that has DeploymentWorkbench installed. Version is MDT6.3.8456
Everything looks to work fine until you attempt to open the properties of the deployment share and click on the Win PE Tab.

When I check Event Viewer I notice the mmc crash had something to do with kernelbase.dll.
I've run sfc /scannow as well as DISM seen in this link it doesn't fix the problem.
https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/all/system-file-check-sfc-scan-and-repair-system-files/bc609315-da1f-4775-812c-695b60477a93

Again this behavior isn't isolated to one system it's doing it even on the server that is deploying the images.
Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

Hi,

Thanks very much for your feedback. We're glad that the question is solved now. It's appreciated that you could click "Accept Answer" to the helpful reply, this will help other users to search for useful information more quickly. Here's a short summary for the problem.

Problem/Symptom:
Deployment Workbench crashes with the error "MDT mmc has detected an error in a snap-in and will unload it" when opening the Win PE tab in properties.

Solution/Workaround:
Install the Windows PE add-on for the Windows ADK. Because from Windows 10, version 1809, Windows Preinstallation Environment (PE) is avalable separately form the Assessment and Deployment Kit (ADK).

Reference Link:
Download and install the Windows ADK

Thanks again for your time!

Best regards,
Simon

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Answer 2

Copied from Ismael answer which worked for me

Create the following empty folder: C:\Program Files (x86)\Windows Kits\10\Assessment and Deployment Kit\Windows Preinstallation Environment\x86\WinPE_OCs
mkdir C:\Program Files (x86)\Windows Kits\10\Assessment and Deployment Kit\Windows Preinstallation Environment\x86\WinPE_OCs
Disable x86 support in MDT when you have Windows ADK for Windows 11 installed.
This is enough to avoid the crash in Windows PE tab and skip x86 boot images creation.

Answer 3

You’ll have to manually create an empty x86 WinPE directory to resolve the crash of the Deployment Workbench.

1. Navigate to the Windows ADK installation directory:C:\Program Files (x86)\Windows Kits\10\Assessment and Deployment Kit\Windows Preinstallation Environment
2. Create a new folder, name it: x86
3. Create a new folder in the x86 folder, name it: WinPE_OCs

It's appreciated that you could click "Accept Answer" to the helpful reply, this will help other users to search for useful information more quickly.

Answer 4

Hi @Simon Ren-MSFT
Thanks for the info but unfortunately that didn't solve the MMC crashing problem.

Another problem I'm seeing is the deployment server reports the deployment was successful with no errors. However the device shows it had 1 error during the deployment and stopped the deployment wizard.

I don't know if the two problems are related but I figured I'd better take care of the MMC crashing problem before I address the problem that doesn't seem to matter.

I as well as my coworkers inherited our MDT setup so attempting to maintain it with out having all the details on the initial setup has been a challenge.

I know when I started working on updating our deployment server it was not using the latest MDT version so I had to update the MDT that was installed.
I might have missed some things when updating the server because at one time the deployment share was on the same partition as the server OS but was moved to a different partition.

I can't find the configuration manager or even the Microsoft Endpoint Manager on our server hosting the LiteTouch boot as well as deployment share.
Shouldn't that be included when you install the MDT and Win ADK?

Thanks again for the advice.

Answer 5

Hi,

Thanks for posting in Microsoft MECM Q&A forum.

As the issue happend on multiple device, it may be caused by the snap-in trying to reach a server share on a server that was decommissioned. We could try to detect and remove the missing share using the commands below as example to allow the snap-in to start properly.

PS C:\> Import-Module 'C:\Program Files\Microsoft Deployment Toolkit\Bin\MicrosoftDeploymentToolkit.psd1'
PS C:\> Get-MDTPersistentDrive

Name Path Description

DS001 \Server01/Distribution MDT Deployment Share

PS C:\> Remove-MDTPersistentDrive -Name DS001

Similar thread for your reference:
Deployment Workbench MMC Error

Best regards,
Simon

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