The Realm of the Verbal Processor

Jarvis's Ramblings

Build and Capture Task Sequence Failure

I have fought with this before and didn’t figure it out. Been fighting with it again and finally made an educated guess that has since been backed up by finding a thread to support my findings.

I created a Task Sequence in SCCM to “Build and capture a reference operating system image”. I am using the Vista SP1 DVD that I imported into Operating System Install Packages. It gets part of the way through the install, and then fails. By opening a command prompt on the machine running the Task Sequence (F8), I was able to look at the log files. In looking at the x:windowstempsmstslogsmsts.log log file, I saw an entry that stated “Windows Setup Failed, code 31”. That was followed by “Exiting with code 80004005“. Not a lot of help. Then I found the x:\windows\temp\smstslog\windowssetuplogs\setuperr.log log file. That contained the following lines:

Callback_Productkey_Validate: EditionID for product key was NULL.
Callback_Productkey_Validate: An error occurred writing the product key data to the blackboard.
Callback_Productkey_Validate_Unattend:Invalid product key; halting Setup.[gle=0x00000490]
Callback_Productkey_Validate_Unattend: An error occurred preventing setup from being able to validate the product key; hr = 0x80300006[gle=0x00000490]

Now…I know that my volume license product key is good. I’ve been using it for a long time. Just for grins I popped the Vista DVD in a spare computer and confirmed it. Why is it telling me the license key is invalid?

So here comes the educated guess. I modified the Task Sequence to not use a Product Key…just left that field blank. Hmmm…the install works perfectly fine. That led me to search on something different and find this thread. Basic gist is that if you are using a Task Sequence to install an OS using an Operating System Install Package, you should NOT specify a product key. Perhaps that is documented somewhere, but I haven’t seen it. It is however doggone frustrating to have wasted as much time as I have on this problem.

February 27, 2008 Posted by | ConfigMgr | , , , | 16 Comments

   

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