MDT Error- a connection to the deployment share could not be made the following network device did not have driver installed.

When booting client machines into an MDT environment, the deployment fails with the error:“A connection to the deployment share (\mdt\DeploymentShare) could not be made. Using the traditional aapporach to inject drivers only will fail. As you can see from common forum advice, standard WinPE storage/network driver packs from Dell or Intel were injected into the deployment share. Even attempting to update local machine drivers via Dell Command | Update fails because local OS updates do not impact the isolated WinPE RAM environment.

The breakthrough had nothing to do with missing hardware drivers. Instead, it was an environment trust issue caused by modern Microsoft security hardening. The issue was successfully resolved by the below s shared here:

• Patching the WinPE: Mounting the WinPE boot image via DISM and injecting the latest Windows Cumulative Update (CU).
• Updating Secure Boot Trust: Ensuring the 2023 Secure Boot certificates were fully updated within the boot media so WinPE could successfully authenticate and establish a secure SMB network connection to the server.
• Regenerating Media: Running a complete regeneration of the deployment share boot images and replacing the WIM inside Windows Deployment Services (WDS).

I hope you will find this comment useful. Else, feel free to reply and I will make myself available to answer further queries.

Hi, @Loganathan R

Thank you for posting in Microsoft Q&A forum.

It seems your boot image is missing the WinPE driver for that NIC.

Please try to do the following:

1. Grab the enterprise driver pack for the correct version of WinPE for the OS being deployed. Extract it, then import the WinPE drivers to the boot drivers folder.
2. Update the Deployment Share (will re-generate the boot images)
3. Import the updated boot image to WDS (or whatever you use as a PXE server)

The similar thread for your reference:

https://community.spiceworks.com/topic/2133949-a-connection-to-the-deployment-share-could-not-be-made

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