A few days ago, I wanted to create a new Reference Image using MDT 2013, as I normally do it a few times a year. Back in July 2016, when I used the Capture Task Sequence for the last time, this worked without any issues.
When running the Task Sequence now, with the current Windows Updates available in WSUS from October 2016, I was getting the following Error a few hours after starting the Task Sequence.
ZTIWindowsUpdate has run and failed too many times. Count = 8
As you can see from the error above, the Task Sequence failed completing the “Windows Update (Pre-Application Installation)” Step, because of a reached Reboot Count.
When looking at the Reference VM, I actually couldn’t see any errors regarding Windows Updates. The VM already installed nearly 260 Updates successfully at this point.
If you started searching for new Updates, it found only 1 remaining Update, that could be installed successfully.
After installing that single update, the System seemed fully patched.
Because of the huge amount of Windows Updates, which are already available for Windows 7, I tried to increase the MAX_UPDATES Constant, in the ZTIWindowsUpdate.wsf Script. This file can be found inside the “Scripts” Folder in your Deployment Share.
I doubled the value from 100 to 200 and kicked off the Task Sequence again. (In my case, increasing it to 150 wasn’t enough.)
To my Surprise, the Task Sequence ran through without any errors and with all Updates installed. If you ran into the same issue, you can give this workaround a try.
However, with the recent change of the Windows 7 / 8.1 Servicing Models, this workaround might no longer be necessary in the coming month.
MAX_UPDATES does not limit the *total* number of updates that are applied via the Windows Update Agent, instead it’s just the number of updates that are installed during each update pass. ZTIWindowsUpdate.wsf is designed to re-run itself again after each pass to see if can find any more updates.
So, if you have 250 updates, it will run though the first 100, restart, then run through the next 100, and finally through the remaining 50, whoops, there are 15 more updates that need to be updated, so acutally 65. Nothing should be left behind, unless you have say 900 updates, and you hit the MSIT_WU_REBOOT_MAX count.
My personal recommendation is to use KB3125574 “Convenience rollup update for Windows 7 SP1 and Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1” That should reduce the number of updates down to something more reasonable (below 100 currently).
As for your specific problem above, there could be another problem like a bad Defender update causing ZTIWIndowsUpdate.wsf to re-run over and over again. If you still need help, zip up the ZTIWIndowsUpdate.log file and send to my E-Mail account.
Thanks for your detailed comment Keith. We currently don’t use the Convenience rollup in my organization due to the known issues, but I will give it a try tomorrow. Maybe it does change something in the behavior.
Your explanation was also my understanding on how the Update Mechanism of MDT works. In my case however, it failed on the reached reboot count as indicated by the Error Message on the Screenshot. I couldn’t determine the actual Updates, which was responsible for the boot-loop, I just noticed that the error went away, when increasing MAX_UPDATES. I will keep the blog post updated If I got any more details.
Hi,
What issues you have with the Convenience Rollup? I’m using it when building my Windows 7 reference images and I haven’t noticed any issues with it.
I didn’t have any specific issue. I never used it before, but I gave it a try to find out if it fixes the issue described above. But it didn’t unfortunately.