Well, back at work after completing Maintaining and Troubleshooting Windows Vista Computers. This course was similar to the last one (some content repeated). Some useful new info, but really a lot of the same stuff as in XP – or close enough that it doesn’t really matter. So, we’ve gone ”back to the lab again” (5 points for the artist & 10 points for the song with these lyrics) and making some progress, so that’s good.

On the other hand, I got an email from Microsoft this morning saying that BDD is now called Microsoft Deployment, so I’m thinking to run this up in the lab and see if it’s more stable than BDD 3 (I really hope so).

Not much successful has happened so far today, Vista keeps blue screening, BDD builds aren’t working so I’m rebulding the server and will put BDD back up and go again.

Just for completeness, when I managed to get past the blue screen it was only to get the disk booting again which managed to tell me that the build was complete with the following errors:

• Unable to get WinNT ADSI provider: (-2147221020)
• ERROR – ZTITatoo state restore task should be running in the full OS, aborting
• ZTIERROR – Non-zero return code by ZTITatoo, rc = 1 (this one twice) 

This morning was taken up with chasing how to update the security updates in SMS. I didn’t get anything to work for this, but Dave’s managed to coerce SMS into displaying some new updates.

So, since yesterday I’ve largely been trying things in BDD and seeing how it goes in Vista. So, make a couple of changes to a lab build in BDD, recreate the deployment point, put it into Deployment Services, then go to the PC and boot from network. All goes well.

Then things start rolling downhill. BDD starts crashing when adding in more Operating Systems, then it can’t see any OS’s at all. Repair and restart does nothing. So I uninstall and reinstall having removed the directories Distribution and Media. Things look a little better after this, so I reimport Vista, PE 2004, XP SP2 and decide to try creating an OSD deployment point. Sadly, I’m told “The required MSXML3 files were not found”. This link seems to be the fix, but since we’re still having issues rebuilding other PCs in the lab with the current XP build, I’ve decided to defer the OSD Feature Pack update until we make some headway there.