PXE Boot Fails and WDS Fails to Start With Event 258 and Error 0xC1030104 After Removing Multicast Service Point Role form an SCCM / ConfigMgr 2007 Distribution Point

During an office-wide Windows 7 OSD migration this weekend we had some workstations downloading extremely slow over multicast. While that is a problem unto itself that may need to be solved at a later date we were down to 8 workstations so I decided to cut multicast off and let them fall back to SMB since SMB downloads on other workstations seemed to be working just fine. It seemed the best way to accomplish this was to simply remove the multicast role from the distribution point. This strategy appeared to work. The workstations did in fact fall back to SMB and the installations completed in a reasonable amount of time.

Of course if that were the end of the story I wouldn’t be writing this now. We tried to PXE boot one last workstation that had failed the night before and found that it couldn’t contact the PXE service point for a boot file. This behavior seemed odd as it was working fine only a few hours ago. Checking the pxecontrol.log showed the following:

adding address to server list [Site System IP]
adding address to server list 127.00.00.01
Sending availiability packet to: [Site System IP]
Sent 274 bytes to [Site System IP]:4011
Recieved Packet 04EC6B38 does not have associated request.
Error validating replies
Sending availiability packet to: 127.0.0.1
Sent 274 bytes to 127.000.000.001:4011
Error receiving replies

A quick inspection of the Windows Deployment Services Server service showed it to be stopped and attempting to manually start the service gave an error.  Checking the event log showed (among other things) Event 258 which looked like this:

I’ll skip all the boring troubleshooting and cut right to the solution.  To correct the issue:

• Remove the boot images from the PXE distribution point
• Remove the PXE service point from the site server
• Remove the WDS roles from the server
• Restart (as requested by the role removal)
• Reinstall the WDS roles on the server
• Add the PXE service point back to the site server
• Copy the boot images back to the PXE distribution point (note that this doesn’t take too long because the server will still have the compressed copy of the package so it just has to decompress it)