If you’re using a 12th Generation Dell server, disable the SD Card in the BIOS.  Keep reading for how I discovered this.

We recently received a handful of new Dell R720s and needed to lay down Windows Server 2008 x64. Got everything cabled, powered them up, PXE booted from our SCCM 2007 machine, it formatted the disks, and right when it went to deploy the OS, it failed with (taken from the SCCM Console, advertisement status):

The task sequence execution engine failed executing the action (Apply Operating System) in the group (Install Operating System) with the error code 2147942450
Action output: d-x64.xml”
Not a data image
ApplyOSRetry:
TSLaunchMode: PXE
OSDUseAlreadyDeployedImage: FALSE
Searching for next available volume:
Volume E:\ is a valid target.
Found volume E:!sSystemPart.empty(), HRESULT=80004005 (e:\nts_sms_fre\sms\framework\tscore\diskvolume.cpp,128)
Unable to locate a bootable volume. Attempting to make E:\ bootable.
volume.getDisk() == iBootDisk, HRESULT=80070032 (e:\nts_sms_fre\sms\client\osdeployment\applyos\installcommon.cpp,680)
MakeVolumeBootable( pszVolume ), HRESULT=80070032 (e:\nts_sms_fre\sms\client\osdeployment\applyos\installcommon.cpp,759)
ConfigureBootVolume(targetVolume), HRESULT=80070032 (e:\nts_sms_fre\sms\client\osdeployment\applyos\applyos.cpp,364)
System partition not set
Volume E:\ is not on the boot disk and can not be made bootable.
Failed to make volume E:\ bootable. Please ensure that you have set an active partition on the boot disk before installing the operating system.
The request is not supported. (Error: 80070032; Source: Windows). The operating system reported error 2147942450: The request is not supported.

But what does that mean?

If you notice, there are all sorts of errors in there, but the main one to focus on is 80070032. After Googling this for a while, I read all sorts of posts, but almost all of them pointed do disk format issues.

I opened the smsts.log with SMS Trace and saw this:

‘System partition not set’ means no partition is set as bootable with an MBR, aka the ‘system’ partition.

‘Volume E:\ is not on the boot disk and can not be made bootable’  But why is it not, it’s the only physical disk?  Are you sure?  It’s all because of our little friend, Mr. SD Card.

Yeah? And now what?

At first glance, it looks like it’s having trouble working with the E drive, which seems totally logical, as that’s partition 0 on disk 0.

I ran through the typical steps of using diskpart to clean & partition the disk, everything looked fine. It was when I fat-fingered the format command that I discovered the issue. I had actually typed “format c: /q” and saw something about it already having a label and that it’s FAT or FAT32, one of the two, not NTFS, though, and we need NTFS.

After a quick check, the internal SD card was getting picked up as the C drive, and might actually be write-protected (I didn’t check).

I disabled it in the BIOS and BAM!!! OSD is now working.