When things go wrong during MDT Deployment (Part 1) October 23, 2009

Occasionally, things do go wrong during MDT deployment.

Most of the time the best place to start looking is the Bdd.log file. While on the MDT development team, we tried hard to ensure that the client scripts wrote to the logs frequently, so we could debug problems later with minimal effort.

Typically each script will write out to a corresponding log file *and* to bdd.log. So for example if you were running the ZTIWindowsUpdate.wsf script, that script would write out to ZTIWindowsUpdate.log *and* bdd.log.

MDT Litetouch log files are written to a common location, bdd.log. This log file is located typically in one of the following locations:

• If you are running from a WinPE boot disk, and the local machine does not yet have any partitions defined, typically the logs are located on the WinPE Disk: x:\MININT\SMSOSD\OSDLOGS\bdd.log.
• After the main hard disk partition on the client machine has been created, MDT will start logging to the local c: drive at: c:\MININT\SMSOSD\OSDLOGS\bdd.log. Typically, during scenarios when we are not installing an OS from scratch, this is the default location for Log files. For example if we are running a Task Sequence that is installing a set of applications only.
• When the entire Litetouch process is finished, MDT will archive the contents of the logs to c:\windows\temp\depoymentlogs\bdd.log.
• Also if you have the variable SLShare defined, when the Litetouch Process is finished, MDT will archive the contents of the log to that share. For example: SLSHARE=%DeployRoot%\BDDLogs.

There is a new property I created for MDT 2010, called SLShareDynamicLogging. For example: SLShareDynamicLogging = \\MyServer\PublicWriteShare\MDTLogs\. This property will write debugging information to the network share defined in addition to c:\MININT\SMSOSD\OSDLOGS. Please be aware that MDT 2010 writes a *lot* of debugging information to the log, and adding another logging destination will slow down MDT. I recommend using it only in advanced debugging scenarios when you can’t access the log files on the client machine.

Keith