Network boot of Windows Defender Offline will not update

4

I have been working on configuring a network bootable virus removal suite, and I am using the Windows Defender WinPE iso generated from using this 64-bit tool. The tool downloads and creates an ISO for you. I extract the ISO in order to get the source boot.wim file and I make the following edits with the DISM tool:

  • Mount the WIM file locally using DISM
  • Remove bootfix.bin file (Removes "Press Any Key to Boot from CD/DVD.." message)
  • Drop two files, mpam-fex64.exe & FilesList64.dll into the root of the wim file (Most current definitions at time of downloading)
  • Add generic networking drivers to allow older machines to get a DHCP address
  • Commit changes to WIM file and unmount it

Once all that is done, I transfer the boot.wim file to my Windows Deployment Server and add it as a boot image. Clients are now able to boot into the environment, here is the process:

Client Network Boot > DHCP Request > PXE Boot Screen > Windows Deployment Services > Virus Removal Environment

Once the client machine is booted into this environment, you can scan your computer or update the virus definitions, but any time I try to update the definitions, it fails due to a network error and gives me the error code 0x80004005.

Things I have tried:

  • Putting Client machine on an outside VLAN (results in 0x80072ee7 error code)
  • Using ipconfig /release & ipconfig /renew while in the environment
  • Disabling the firewall via command line while in the environment
  • Giving the program / user accounts involved write access to the WDS Server
  • I wrote a script that automatically downloaded new updates, injected them into the image, and re-uploaded it to the server. But for whatever reason, each time this would occur it would fatten the WinSxS folder by ~80mb, so this quickly grew to an unreasonable size.

Any research of the two error codes given has been somewhat unsuccessful, they seem to be more of general windows update / networking errors. Unless someone is seeing something I didn't.


So with all of that given information, my question is: Why is my Network Bootable WDO environment not able to update?

Any insight is appreciated, let me know if you need additional information

networking
update
pxe-boot
anti-virus
wds
asked on Server Fault Dec 13, 2013 by Callen L

1 Answer

2

This was such an AWESOME idea that I had to try it myself. What I did was:

  1. Open the iso to get the boot.wim file.
  2. Mount the wim locally.
  3. Inject a bunch of drivers offline for my environment. (Not just older drivers, all of them.)
  4. Drop the mpam-fex64.exe file into the top level of the wim.
  5. Unmount the wim.
  6. Add it to the WDS boot options.

Mine works flawlessly, successfully updating the definitions and auto-running Windows Defender without making me press a key. I'm going to guess that either you're missing a network card driver or that something else got mangled while you were adding and removing files, as those are the only things we did differently.

answered on Server Fault Dec 26, 2013 by Katherine Villyard • edited Dec 30, 2013 by Katherine Villyard

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