Monday, July 15, 2013

WdsClient: There was a problem initializing WDS Mode

Tonight I wanted to deploy a bunch of Windows Servers from a customised WIM file for my home lab environment running on VMware Workstation - need to test something for a customer tomorrow :).  In minutes I had built a new WDS server with DHCP and PXE boot services, however when I went to boot my first VMware machine from my WDS server, the PXE boot went through fine however I ran into the following error.

WdsClient: There was a problem initializing WDS Mode


After a good 10 minutes trying to figure out what was going on I ran services.msc on my host physical Laptop.  The darn VMware DHCP Service was running!


The virtual machine was booting of the WDS DHCP Server after booting it went to obtain a second IP address which was the VMware DHCP Service!  Ahg!

18 comments:

  1. Thank you :)
    Just ran into the same problem.

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  2. I got the same problem using VMware. I have it working after disabling the VMware DHCP Service. Thanks Clint, it really helps.....

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  3. Very clever! Your finding in this article was a lifesaver.

    I never would have considered checking or known that the "VMware Workstation" host (for me I use "VMware Fusion" as I have a Mac) has its own VMware DHCP Service running in the background thus changing the IP address info a second time for the guest VM (or the WDS client). Thank you so much Clint! :)

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  5. Wow! It is resolved in my case too. Thanks a ton :)

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  6. Wow! It is resolved in my case too. Thanks a ton :)

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  7. Just want to add one more thanks to the list. It was driving me batty!

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  8. thanks a LOT. got same error and best first shot answer.

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  9. Thanks Dear, Thank You very much. God Bless you.

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  10. Thanks for the tip Clint

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  11. thanks dear its working....after stop my VMWare DHCP service......Good Bless you...

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  12. Thank you. Save me a lot of time !!.

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  13. Thanks a lot... It resolved my query .. thumbs up for you

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  14. Thank you so much for posting this. Solved an issue that I have had for quite some time now.

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  15. Good to help us ,,,but i want to know why this error happen while i have choose that my vm pxe client use hosted only network so is this doesn't mean that there is an internal network??

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