Month: July 2016

Fixing Windows cannot connect to printer with Error Error 0x0000007e when shared on Windows Server 2003 or 2008 32 bit (x86) and your client is 64 bit

John Leave a comment

Printers and FaxesSo I was out installing a new laptop for a client recently, their server infrastructure is very old (they’re still running Server 2003 but about to migrate) and doing the final stage of the deployment I was installing the local printer in the office but got Windows cannot Connect to the Printer (0x0000007e) error every time I tried.
I finally stumbled upon an old forum topic regarding HP print driver incompatibilities between 32 server and 64 bit client machines where it was unable to find a particular file.

The trick was to delete the following registry key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Print\Printers\PrinterNameHere\CopyFiles\BIDI replacing PrinterNameHere with the name of your printer. This then allowed me to connect to the printer correctly on the 64 bit client without any errors.

Issues Deploying a Custom Windows 10 Start Menu Layout when using an image with a Default Profile

John 4 Comments

So I’m in the final stages of getting our Windows 10 Deployment ready to go and I am currently in the process of branding and customising our image, which includes setting a custom Start Menu Tile Layout.  This is done with the use of two PowerShell commands Export-StartMenuLayout and Import-StartMenuLayout.

I created our preferred start menu, exported on my test computer and then added a Task to our MDT Deployment Task Sequence.

I found that this completed without any errors but Windows was not applying the Start Menu, after a bit of digging around, I found an issue where if you have CopyProfile set to true in your unattend xml answer file then there is another step that you need to complete which is to delete the TileDataLayer folder located in C:\Users\Default\AppData\Local and once I added that line to my batch file the Start Menu appeared.  My complete batch file is as follows;

powershell.exe -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -Command "Copy-Item '%~dp0StartMenu.xml' -destination C:\Windows\Temp; Import-StartLayout -LayoutPath C:\Windows\Temp\StartMenu.xml -MountPath $env:SystemDrive\; Remove-Item C:\Windows\temp\StartMenu.xml -Force"
rmdir C:\Users\Default\AppData\Local\TileDataLayer /q /s

Hope that helps.