SCCM OSD: Failed to get client identity (80004005)

Deploying clients with SCCM is great when everything works smoothly, but when you get an error…. it really can be a pain in the A**…ehm,  Bum…

At one of my customers, where we had to work with some old/spare devices, I had issues with deploying them. The WinPE booted, but then directly restarted. I always enable F8 – testing mode in the Boot Image, so I was able to check if the client had an IP address and if the client had normal access to the local harddrive. Both were OK. So next step: Check the log!

From the Command Prompt I opened the SMSTSlog:
sccm-log
X:SMSBinx64CMTrace.exe X:WindowsTempSMSTSLogsmsts.log

In the log I noticed the following error: Failed to get client identity (80004005)

sccm

After reading a lot of Blog posts, pointing this could be a CA issue, or just a problem with the SCCM servers, I finally found a blog telling me to check the BIOS time and date.
And that did the trick! The machines which had this issue, all were old, or not used for a while. And for some reason the machines had the wrong time and date set in the BIOS.
After changing the time and date in the BIOS to the current time and date, everything went well ! 🙂

3 comments

  1. I’ve just had a similar issue but it was nothing to do with date/time or any of the other causes I’ve seen. We are running SCCM 1606.

    It only affected VMs that used a boot.iso as they couldn’t PXE boot. The logs showed it setting MP from internal to externally facing where it then couldn’t get the policy.

    Fix was to create a new boot.iso and in the media creation tool specify the MP. This then worked fine.

    1. Hi Roy,

      Thank you for your comment.
      Error 80004005 is a generic error and could be caused by multiple reasons.

      Thank you for sharing your solution.

    • Oliver on 10 April 2017 at 12:39
    • Reply

    Hi Ruben
    Perfect solution, had exact the same error on a notebook at my company.. After checking and correcting the bios time and date all worked wonderfully

    Thanks for posting this.. You just made my day

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