Wednesday, June 25, 2014

Beware Cut and Paste - 0x800700a1 during Task Sequence WMI Query

Before I go on, this was ALL my own fault. There said it. Honesty being the best policy and all that. I say this because I must confess; confess because I feel like a numpty.

So, what happened..?

I was putting together a Task Sequence to deploy Win 7 x64 SP1 to my Oracle VirtualBox test machine. I do this because it's quicker than walking over to the build desk, unboxing a Dell and plugging it all in. It's all of 5 metres #lazysysadmin. But anyway, serves my lazy backside right. 

Where was I? Oh, yes. Task Sequence:

1) Boot into WinPE
2) Query WMI for Model 'VirtualBox' and if True, then Partition and Format Disk 
3) Proceed with Task Sequen.. oh, wait ...fail step 2 with 0x800700a1(The task sequence execution engine failed evaluating the condition for an action)

I went through my step 2 Task Sequence. It was correct, damned you! I swear. I checked it over. Look!



Even when I ran a wbemtest query from within WinPE, it returned the correct value. Look! See?


And I even checked SMSTS.LOG. Look! See? SEE?!


 Oh. 




Yours truly had copy-pasted from my notes and instead of straight speech marks (" ") I had put some sixty-six speech marks (“ “) in my WMI query. 

What a numpty.

No comments: