Windows Deployment Services (WDS) – Cannot locate Windows Deployment Services

After recently doing an in-place upgrade of our server that hosts MDT and WDS I encountered an issue when trying to deploy our latest image release. Luckily it’s a fairly simple fix.

Example of the issue

The Fix

The fix for this problem is fairly straightforward, and it just requires you to ‘reset’ the WDS deployment by uninitializing and then re-initializing the installation, which can be done via an Administrator command prompt using the following commands –

wdsutil /uninitialize-server
wdsutil /initialize-server /remInst:C:\RemoteInstallFolder

Important: ensure you replace ‘C:\RemoteInstallFolder’ with your WDS remote install directory, this is purely for example purposes.

Once done, refresh the Windows Deployment Services windows and it should appear correctly.

7 responses to “Windows Deployment Services (WDS) – Cannot locate Windows Deployment Services”

  1.  Avatar
    Anonymous

    “The service did not respond to the start or control request in a timely fashion”

    Like

  2.  Avatar
    Anonymous

    Worked like a charm. Thanks.

    Liked by 1 person

  3.  Avatar
    Anonymous

    Nice fix thanks, worked for me too.

    Like

  4.  Avatar
    Anonymous

    Thx. Worked for me.

    Like

  5.  Avatar
    Anonymous

    Thank you. This process has resolved the same issue after an in-place upgrade from 2012R2 to 2019.

    Like

  6.  Avatar
    Anonymous

    This fixed my WDS issues after I migrated the VM from Hyper-V to VMware. Thanks 🙂

    Like

  7. Alex Widén (@vovven) Avatar

    Thx, this post was helpful and resolved the issue for me.
    We got this problem after upgrading from 2012 to 2019

    Liked by 1 person

Leave a reply to Alex Widén (@vovven) Cancel reply

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