John Quirk's Blog

I’ve been struggling with this a little, so thought it prudent to add to the glut of improbably remedies to 16389 which litter the internet.

Here I’m trying to build a Windows Server 2008 R2 server using ConfigMgr. The whole thing looks fine until the Windows Setup routine kicks off whereupon I get this error. Accessing a command prompt on the failed machine gives me access to the logs, interestingly there’s nothing on the C: drive other than the log folder:

Delving into the SMSTSLog folder there are the usual suspects, none of which give me anything unusual, but in the C:\SMSTSLog\WindowsSetupLogs folder there’s a SetupAct.log, this is setup actions (not accounts…) and describes in detail each action carried out during the unattended Windows Server installation. Reading backwards from the end I quickly happen across these lines:

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Fallback_Productkey_Validate_Unattend: An error occurred preventing setup from being able to validate the product key;

PublishMessage: Publishing message [The unattend answer file contains an invalid product key. Either remove the invalid key or provide a valid product key in the unattend answer file to proceed with Windows installation.]

This installation is blocked from completing due to compliance failures or invalid input; this is not an internal error.

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So if you were ever wondering what happens in ConfigMgr if you mix up your Windows Standard product key with your Datacenter edition one, now you know!