At my employer we have some older Dell machines that are somewhat past their prime in terms of end user computers, but work well as generic PCs. So, we have a couple spare OptiPlex 7010 desktop computers that needed to be re-imaged. I’ve now had two of these computers that start to image, reboot after the boot image is staged, start the task sequence and then receive the “unable to read task sequence configuration disk” error.

Now upon starting the task sequence, the first thing we do is wipe the disk, so the hard drive is already wiped by the time we get to this error. During my internet search, I saw a number of blogs that referenced running diskpart, selecting the disk and choosing to “clean” it. This is basically what MECM is already doing when it formats the disk. Also, some of these search results went all the way back to SCCM 2007 days, which is where I started my Configuration Manager journey.

I exported the logs from the problem machine and reviewed the smsts.log. There was nothing substantial in there, and in fact everything looked like it was functioning normal according to the logs. TO THE BIOS! Once I was in the BIOS, which was up-to-date, I started scrolling through the settings. Eventually I wound up disabling USB boot support and Disabled USB 3.0 support. I had come across a couple blogs that mentioned they needed to use USB 2.0 ports instead of 3.0 for their Task Sequence Media. I however am using PXE (network) booting to image my machines. Once I unchecked USB booting support and USB 3.0 the Task Sequence continued on properly.

This may be a unique situation due to the age of the machine. Your first step should be making sure your BIOS is updated. In my case the next step was unchecking the USB boot support and USB 3.0 support. YMMV.