I've come to a point where I don't want to dig any deeper, as I may find something else that appears to be broken.It all started way back when (last week) as I tried to upgrade to SP2 from SP1 R2. SMS components failed to install. Then ConfigMgr said that the servers were unreachable, yet I could ping them. Ok, fine...put the upgrade on the back burner and research the issue.Then PXE decided to stop working. Not too bad, have had this happen before, so I started running through the motions:Verify that all the components are installed, all services running, can ping the server from the client machine.Rebooted both servers just for grins. (two servers involved for now).Checked the certs, even created new ones.This is when I ran into the next issue. The boot images will no longer update. They fail almost immediately, showing red "Xs" for every step.Searched and found posts claiming the AIK may have something to do with it. No prob - uninstalled, rebooted, installed, rebooted (for grins), tried updating the image again.No go. Nothing in event viewer as far asI can see. Have tried searching through the various ConfigMgr logs, no luck so far.Uninstalled the AIK again, and installed a different version. Still no luck.Decided possibly to create new boot images - maybe the old ones were corrupted. But I noticed that the boot images' distribution points are still showing status of "removal pending" for the old boot images - several hours later.Stumbled into another minefield: in Site Status, several of the SMS components have gone critical, with one (SMS Distribution Manager) showing over 52,000 errors now. Researching into the errors, I found that there is a tool called the ConfigMgr Service Manager (SMS Service Manager), but it also refuses to work, so I can't try to log what is happening with the SMS components.So I decided to try to roll back to the last backup that we took (last week before attempting to install SP2). Problem is, the SMS_Component_Manager doesn't exist anymore, so it fails a repair almost immediately as well.ANY ideas whatsoever? It feels like everywhere I try to turn, I hit a brick wall; like anytime I look somewhere for a chance to fix something, I'm running into something else broken.

Left out one small detail. According to the SP2 installer, it fails to install SP2. According to the control panel though, ConfigMgr is SP2 now.

Time to call CSS. There is no way we can provide support for a catastrophic failure as you've described above via these forums. There are probably multiple things going and some uniqueness to your environment that can only get hashed out and resolved through a professional, dedicated call.Jason | http://myitforum.com/cs2/blogs/jsandys | http://blogs.catapultsystems.com/jsandys/default.aspx | Twitter @JasonSandys

Just for the sake of argument, I'll go ahead and post today's findings here. I do now have a Microsoft case opened. ConfigMgr 2007 issues: SP2 upgrade: Performed full backup of site prior to attempting to upgrade to SP2, then ran through the installer. It would get through to step 4 (of about 21), but fail to contact the SMS components on remote servers (and subsequently fail). Attempts after this to install again have also failed. After the failure, examined services.msc, and several SMS services were missing (such as SMS_SITE_COMPONENT_MANAGER, SMS_SERVER_LOCATOR_POINT, SMS_REPORTING_POINT, among others I may not know about). This was (presumably) beginning to cause other issues with functionality. After several attempts to get services functioning again, a site repair was deemed necessary to attempt to get the site to a pre-SP2 state, back to when it was functioning properly. In Add/Remove programs, it shows that SP2 is installed. If you examine the properties of the actual site, site version is still listed as 4.00.6221.1000 (SP1) with R2 installed. Go to the client installation methods, and it shows that the client has been upgraded to 4.00.6487.2000 (assuming SP2). Believe that ConfigMgr may now be stuck between SP1 R2 and SP2. Current Status: As listed above, ConfigMgr is running on SP1 R2, although Windows believes it is on SP2. If you try to use the SP2 installer to do a repair, it wants you to either upgrade to SP2 or uninstall the site server. If you want to do a repair, you have to use the installer for SP1 or R2. Site repair took, restoring limited use. All collections (and subcollections) are completely gone. Interesting side note: When restoring from the backup, first time it failed, stating that I needed to verify the backup location. I verified and entered the location again, and again it failed. When i went into the location where the backup was, the folder had been emptied. I verified that the backup was in the folder before I began. Fortunately, i had made another copy of the backup (for just such a situation), and was able to copy the entire contents back into the backup folder, and from then it did the repair. PXE: PXE was completely failing at one point (12-1-09), but after the site repair/restore back to pre-SP2 installation, was able to get PXE to half-work again. It will image new machines, but will not allow us to reimage pre-existing machines, due to the machines existing already in the ConfigMgr collections. Cannot delete the computers from the collections however, becaue none of the collections show up anymore (listed as separate issue further down). Current status: PXE will image fresh machines that have not been added to the domain yet (or otherwise have a ConfigMgr record in the database). If the machine existed in the ConfigMgr database, PXE aborts. Collections: All collections are missing - they do not display. I've tried to refresh, update collection membership, as well as having ConfigMgr attemtp to rebuild the database indexes, to see if it would then re-populate. So far, nothing has worked. Last night, I did a repair, then while working on other things, the collections did show back up. Unfortunately, I do not remember exactly what i did that got the collections to show again. After it seemed that everything was functioning again, I decided to attempt to upgrade to SP2 again (since the repair had finished, and I believed this to be the best chance to do so). The upgrade failed again, so I had to perform another repair from the backup as well as have it reinstall the SMS components. Collections never populated again after that. Current Status: Collections are all still missing, although ConfigMgr seems to know that they exist (since a PXE boot will fail to a computer that is already in a collection without an advertisement for it, but new ones will image successfully). Site Status: Several components now reporting issues, ranging from Warning to Critical. Most distribution points are no longer reporting in, and other server distribution points are showing that they are reinstalling SMS components. Current Status: I am currently at a loss as to why some of the DPs aren't communicating. Do not know if the Central server has changed enough that they can't find it (but some can), or if it's a client version issue (haven't been able to go through the logs yet), or what. Boot Images: Cannot seem to get boot images to update at all, and when attempting to remove from a DP, it gets stuck in "Removal Pending".Also attempted to create standalone media to see if we can get it to a point where we can freely re-image if we need to until ConfigMgr is fixed, but it fails when attempting to add certain software to the standalone image (Forefront). The file hashes don't match. The problem with that though, is that if I tell it to update the DPs, it doesn't do anything.

Hi!I would very much like to hear the outcome of this! I have exactly the same issues after upgrading to sp2, though my upgrade did finish off gracefully.I'd appriciate some info on this one, as i'm really strugling with this one...Kind RegardsMichael.

Which issue or issues are you talking about? Collections not displaying, PXE issues, boot images? This is an extremely complex situation, so you have to provide as much details as possible. And even then it might be impossible to solve that here in the forums.

As stated earlier in this thread(see below), I have exactly the same scenario, after SP2 was installed. Initially everything seemed working 100 % even with better performance than running with sp1 :)How ever I soon discovered that, I could not distribute a new package or update boot images.When I removed a package I could not redistribute it, Boot Images: Cannot seem to get boot images to update at all, and when attempting to remove from a DP, it gets stuck in "Removal Pending" same goes for my packages.... Weird, I know this probably is diffecult to "fix" through a forum, but this thread was the only source of information that I could find on the net, that matches my scenario(so fare).I'm close to start all over :(, but my ego bids me to try finding a solution :)And thanks for taking your time on this!Best Regards Michael. ConfigMgr 2007 issues: SP2 upgrade: Boot Images: Cannot seem to get boot images to update at all, and when attempting to remove from a DP, it gets stuck in "Removal Pending". A little ekstra info:I've checked the filesystem permissions, and all looks good.SMS Distribution Manager failed to copy package "P0000041" from "G:\Packages\SoftwarePackages\Office communicator\" to "MSWNET:["SMS_SITE=P00"]\\MPARHSCCM01\SMSPKGG$\P0000041\". Possible cause: SMS Distribution Manager does not have sufficient rights to read from the package source directory or to write to the destination directory on the distribution point.Solution: In the SMS Administrator console, verify that the site system connection accounts have sufficient privileges to the source and destination directories. Possible cause: The distribution point might not be accessible to SMS Distribution Manager running on the site server.Solution: If users are currently accessing the package files on the distribution point, disconnect the users first. If the package distribution point is located on a Windows NT computer, you can force users to disconnect by clicking on the "Disconnect users from distribution points" box in the Data Access tab of the Package Properties dialog box. Possible cause: The distribution point does not have enough free disk space to store the package.Solution: Verify that there is enough free disk space. Possible cause: The package source directory contains files with long file names and the total length of the path exceeds the maximum length supported by the operating system.Solution: Reduce the number of folders defined for the package, shorten the filename, or consider bundling the files using a compression utility.

4. Had an issue with SCCM getting to update the images (computer images we created). When attempting to reload the image, it would say "failed to reload image properties". This was caused by improper shares. See, our file shares for the images, source files, etc., is located externally to the server on a SAN. The san is connected to the server as a locally attached frive. Was this way on the old server, is this way on the new one. Thing is, we had missed a permission on the share so that the service account could get to it. Once this was found, I re-setup the share (later found out I had missed another permission - make sure you set the permissions when you share it too), and then the account was able to reload the images, but i was still not able to update the distribution points - it would fail at trying to stage WinPE. Found out that when the WAIK installed, apparently it failed to register two specific .DLLs. Apparently, this happens a bit, because there is a KB article about it. Manually registered the two .DLLs, and this then solved our image issues. Thanks for posting your findings, really useful i think. However, is there any chance you could tell us the KB article you refer to above, we are experiencing this problem only and its a pain!! Also really interesting to see that MS support managed to fix/help you fix the many problems. Our server engineer contacted them about some problems we were having and after 4 weeks of daily dialogue and dozens of hours or remote sessions, he (apparently - this is second hand info btw) fixed it himself.