SCCM OSD Stuck on “Just a moment…”

Estimated reading time: 2 minutes

We came across a problem with our SCCM OSD recently where it was getting through approximately half the build process and then seemingly getting stuck on “Just a moment…” before timing out and not completing the build.

This was a bit of a head scratcher as there did not seem to be any crash or reason for it to just stop. So we started looking at hardware diagnostics, network diagnostics and much more. However, like most annoying IT issues, the solution was very simple and staring us all in the face!

The solution

Once we had gone through all the highly technical diagnostics which turned up absolutely nothing, we then set off another build and again it just froze at the “Just a moment…” screen. WHY?! Then, one of our help desk guys said:

Are you sure there’s nothing crashed in the background?

Us System Center guys immediately dismissed this theory as witchcraft – don’t be stupid and get back to resetting user passwords, we all thought!.

But, as all our combined knowledge spanning 60 years between us had led to nothing, we took a leap of faith in Dave the help desk guy and pressed ALT-Tab – and there is was, this damn error message telling us that a selected role could not be installed. What a bunch of knobs we all felt!

We disabled the Add Role step in the Task Sequence and the build completed without any issue.

So, the morale of the story?

Always check the basics first, do not go running down the highly technical potential issues road before you have learnt to walk through the basics.

What else? – don’t dismiss other people who you feel your are less intelligent than you are – because when it is proven you are no better than anyone else, you are going to feel like a knob!