SOLVED: WdsClient: An Error Occured While Obtaining IP Address

If you are using new (or different) hardware from what you built your Windows image on, you may see:  WdsClient: An Error Occured While Obtaining IP Address From the DHCP Server.  Fortunately, you can ignore most of the other solutions floating around the internet telling you to manually inject the drivers into your image.  Windows Deployment Service (WDS) has a simple mechanism to inject drivers into your image using the WDS GUI.

How to Add Drivers to Windows Deployment Server:

1. Go to your hardware manufacturers website and download the network card driver(s) for the hardware in question
2. Open your WDS MMC, expand the server in question and then expand DRIVERS
3. Select ADD DRIVER PACKAGE,
4. Select SELECT ALL DRIVER PACKAGES FROM A FOLDER and browse to a folder that contains your unpacked drivers
   1. Unpacked drivers means that your driver files must be extracted from their .EXE or .MSI or .ZIP file.
      1. If you do not already know how to do this, download, 7-ZIP and start 7ZIP, select your driver package and click the EXTRACT button
5. In the AVAILABLE DRIVER PACKAGES window just click NEXT
6. In the DRIVER GROUPS window, make sure you choose, SELECT AN EXISTING DRIVER GROUP.
   1. If you do not select a group your drivers will be in WDS but will NOT be applied to any of your images
7. In the TASK COMPLETE window you can click MODIFY THE FILTERS FOR THIS GROUP NOW but I would not
   1. If you add a filter, the drivers will only be applied to devices that meet that filter… I want Windows to figure out if it is needed or not.
      1. The default is “…install all packages that match the installed hardware…” which is good with me

Now you can add those drivers to the image in question.

How to Add Drivers to An Image on your Windows Deployment Server:

1. In WDS, click BOOT IMAGES and right click on the image in question
2. Select ADD DRIVER PACKAGE, then NEXT, then click the SEARCH FOR PACKAGES button
3. The drivers you just added to your WDS server will now appear in the SEARCH RESULTS window
4. Click NEXT, NEXT, NEXT

WDS will then open the image, inject the drivers and close the image.  This is much easier than going through the manual process.

You should not have to restart your WDS service, but if you have troubles, restart it.

Also remember that you will likely want to add these drivers to images other than the BOOT image.  Specifically, you will likely want to repeat the process for the image you are trying to apply and to any CAPTURE image you may have.