MDT 2010 and WinPE 3.1 Reboot issue

If you’ve recently updated your WinPE from 3.0 to 3.1, you may notice an annoying reboot issue.

It looks like this: after you’ve rebuilt the .wim image, and booted from it via WDS (Windows Deployment Services), WinPE boots up and shows the Solution Accelerator background, but after a short period of time, it reboots the PC without having done anything.

This happens if:

1. You’ve got Microsoft Deployment Toolkit (MDT) 2010 Update 1.
2. You’ve upgraded WinPE from 3.0 to 3.1, using the supplemental update ISO.

To fix this problem, Michael Niehaus has some instructions to follow.

Fortunately we don’t use WinRE, so we can use the workaround and still make use of WinPE 3.1. Had we needed WinRE, I would have restored the backup of the WinPE 3.0 files I’d made before copying over the 3.1 files. I’ve been bitten by MDT issues too often to not make backups of stuff I’m overwriting! 😉