Solving an Intermittent Format Problem November 17, 2009

Posted by tmintner in MDT 2010, Troubleshooting.
Tags: Disks, Format, MDT, Troubleshooting
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I received and interesting email yesterday from someone who was performing Lite Touch deployments and it seemed that randomly his deployments would fail at the Format and Partition Disk step in the task sequence.  Examining his BDD.LOG showed this error:

FAILURE ( 7705 ): command: FORMAT.COM C: /FS:NTFS /V:OSDisk /Y /Q   FAILED with error = 4

The first step I had him do was reboot the computer and run through the steps that the script ztidiskpart runs manually.  Those steps are:

1. Boot in Windows PE
2. Press F8
3. Run diskpart
4. select disk 0
5. clean
6. create partition primary
7. assign letter=c:
8. active
9. exit
10. format c: /fs:ntfs /v:OSDisk /Y /Q

Again the format command failed.  He then immediately tried the format again and it worked.  So this was truly an intermittent problem.  My suspicions went up that this was driver related and had him check what kind of storage controller is in the laptop and it was the lovely Intel Matrix Storage Driver.  I checked Intel’s web site and had him download the new driver from here: http://downloadcenter.intel.com/Detail_Desc.aspx?agr=Y&DwnldID=17882&lang=eng 

After removing the old Intel Matrix Driver from his Deployment Workbench, adding this one back in, and regenerating his boot images it worked!

It was a great lesson for both of us and now hopefully you won’t have to go through as many steps.  If you ever run into any intermittent format or partitioning problems start investigating the storage driver!

- Tim Mintner