Came across this the other day and didn’t see anything come up in a Google search so figured I’d blog it.

If you’ve recently added Internet Explorer 9 (IE9) to your MDT deployment, and you’re getting an offlineServicing error when deploying an OS, you may want to check this out.

The problem seems to occur when:

  • You’re running Microsoft Deployment Toolkit 2010
  • You’re deploying Windows 7 with SP1 integrated
  • You’ve added IE9 in .cab format to the deployment via Packages
  • When deploying an OS, you get a fatal error saying: “Windows could not apply unattend settings during pass [offlineServicing]”

To fix the problem, I removed the IE9 .cab from Packages and instead, integrated it into the install.wim image, using these instructions: Windows 7 – Add or Remove Packages Offline

I will attempt to write up proper instructions when I can, but the above link should provide you with enough information to work it out 🙂