MDT 2010 & 2012 – My deployment failed. What and where are logs I should review?

One of the most common questions I get is “What logs should I look at if my deployment fails?” So here is a little summary of the logs you will be most concerned with when troubleshooting a failed Windows 7 or Windows Server 2008 R2 install that are being deployed via Microsoft Deployment Toolkit 2010 or 2012.

First thing to note is that the location of the logs move around depending on what portion of setup we are talking about. Here is a breakdown of the log locations during a MDT install task sequence:

Before the Image is applied to the machine:

X:\MININT\SMSOSD\OSDLOGS

After the system drive has been formatted:

C:\MININT\SMSOSD\OSDLOGS

After Deployment:

%WINDIR%\TEMP\DeploymentLogs

The logs of most interest for troubleshooting a failed install will be:

BDD.LOG – This is an aggregated log of all the MDT Logs.

SMSTS.LOG – This log would be used to troubleshoot Task Sequence errors.

Also note that each MDT script creates its own log files during execution (example: ZTIGather.log, ZTIDiskpart.log, ZTIDrivers.log, etc)

Next Question is: How do I read the logs?

Although you can view the logs with Notepad, it can be hard to make sense of the info in a regular text editor. The MDT logs are most easily read by Trace32 (which is part of the Microsoft SCCM 2007 Toolkit).

Microsoft SCCM 2007 Toolkit
https://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?id=9257

Here is an excerpt of a BDD.log in Notepad:

Here is that same portion of that bdd.log viewed in SMS Trace:

Notice warnings are highlighted in yellow, and errors in red.

Now that you know how to locate more detailed error information in the logs, here are some locations that you can use to search to help find solutions to your issues.

The “Ask The Core Team” Blogs on TechNet:
https://blogs.technet.com/b/askcore/

“The Deployment Guys” Blogs on TechNet:
https://blogs.technet.com/b/deploymentguys/

The MDT Social Forums on TechNet:
https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en/mdt/threads

The Microsoft Deployment Toolkit homepage on TechNet:
https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/solutionaccelerators/dd407791

The MDT Help Files also have a lot of information and serve as a good reference for finding proper syntax and examples.

Hopefully, this information will help aid your MDT troubleshooting. Being armed with the proper tools and knowing where to look for the answers is the key to troubleshooting success.

Bill Spears
Microsoft Corporation
Senior Support Escalation Engineer / Premier Field Engineer

Comments

• Anonymous
  January 01, 2003
  We're a very small organization and don't use Microsoft SCCM 2007 Toolkit. Is there any way other way to get Trace32?
• Anonymous
  May 08, 2012
  You don't need to use SCCM to be able to get the Trace32 tool.  Download it from the following link:Microsoft SCCM 2007 Toolkitwww.microsoft.com/.../details.aspx
• Anonymous
  July 22, 2013
  Once my MDT 2012 Tasksequence is running the State Restore Stage, I found logs for the Task Sequence results under the current user profile here --> %USERPROFILE%AppDataLocalTempSMSTSLOGsmsts.logIs this correct that you are logged in as local Administrator during the autologon stage?
• Anonymous
  May 01, 2015
  What do you do if MDT doesn't think there is an issue? I can reproduce the following 100% of the time. Using the same iso if I mount a virtual disk through the drac (dell 7910) and install win 8.1 i get a disk read of about 250MB/s using winsat no matter how many times i reboot it stays around 250MB/s however if i use the same iso and convert it into a wim file using MDT then use the default client task sequence to deploy the disk read time is around 150MB/s. If I remove all the post deployment options in the task sequence it will start at 250MB/s until you reboot at which point its back down to 150MB/s. What gives?
• Anonymous
  July 06, 2015
  Thanks a lot. your page helped me a whole bunch