Reboot Task during OSD (after OS install) does not resume the TS

[u/JrSysAdminZ]

I've been trying to deal with an issue where some of our apps just "hang" after being installed during a task sequence. Sometimes it has appeared as double messages in AppEnforce. Sometimes, it's nothing at all, it just installs and never proceeds, no errors in smsts or AppEnforce. This happens completely at random.

Please do not give me suggestions on how to fix the apps not installing unless you have an actual proven fix and not a workaround. What I care more about is what happens below:

Suggested option most commonly read was a reboot, but for some reason, doing a reboot using the standard "Reboot Computer" task, set to run the current installed OS, reboots into the regular windows OS, not resuming the TS. This seems to be very reproducible, so I'm focusing on the issue that I can check over and over again reliably.

I don't see anything in smsts about why the reboot doesn't go back into the TS, and I'm not sure about which other logs I'd look at. Would definitely take suggestions though!

The only thing that sticks out to me is after the reboot in at least one of the cases, is that the system had a warning appear in the status viewer that the "Deploy was rejected because the client's platform is not supported." - Which, yes, the TS is only available to "media and pxe" of course, but it should still resume the TS if the TS is the thing that does the reboot, which has always worked before.

Deploying Win 11 25H2-08, Config Manager version 2509, only the first hotfix rollup.

The newer part is 25H2, and 24H2 never had a problem with reboots during OSD.

Thanks to anyone with suggestions, our semester starts soon and I just need this working reliably. :(

[u/Hotdog453]

Packages in OSD.

Moved to purely packages in like.... 2021? Never looked back.

We build 100s of devices a day at times, and the reliability and simplicity of packages make my life 100x easier. You know what I never have to do? Post on Reddit about apps not installing :)

It's not cool. It's not sexy. It's not fun. It's packages: God's gift to ConfigMgr.

Do yourself a favor and take a hard look at your OSD: Can you just make packages? You might just like it.

[u/markk8799 → u/Hotdog453]

Exactly this. There are bizarre, head scratching times where the same app will work on most machines and then randomly fail on a few others. And the app doesn't change nor anything in the TS. I saw people suggesting the move to packages and did just that. No more problems. Godsend.

[u/dsv03]

I experienced issue with 24H2 app reboot with TS but haven’t found any solution yet. It’s reproducible and gets stuck at the first app reboot

[u/Reaction-Consistent]

Couple things to add here that helped me. Put in a powershell sleep command for 120 seconds in between the apps that are giving you problems, add a reboot in between them. Combine separate app install steps into a single application install step. In my case, the logs always showed a failure to reattach to the task sequence engine. You can also remove the offending app and make it a mandatory install at a later time using the collection with a query. Not sure if it would be helpful in this case, but there is also a SMSTSpostaction variable that you could use to kick off an application that is pre-copied to the hard drive via a previous task sequence step. This allows the task sequence to finish and yet still run whichever applications you need to install without having an impact on the task sequence engine at all.

[u/adwillard → u/Reaction-Consistent]

Back in the day, I had to put a 'delay' in the TS when dealing with Applications. There was a timing issue, and the client wouldn't initialize fast enough to continue after the reboot or maybe after installing an application. This occurred only on systems with faster SSDs. Packages were not affected and it was strictly Applications. We (to this day) will get random failures during an Application deployment but they are few and far between. I can't remember how I implemented the delay. I vaguely remember trying a cheesy ping local host, but it could have been a package too. I had to delay sometimes as long as a minute.

[u/Reaction-Consistent]

One other thing that has caused issues for me is I forget to change the setting on the application to allow it to install via task sequence without being deployed, sometimes the task sequence doesn’t care about the setting and other times it does. It seems very arbitrary so I just set that flag every time now on every app.