Unable to start WDS – Error Code 2310

A few weeks ago, I got a call from a customer where the WDS service had stopped working on all SCCM-servers.

The reason for this was that the distribution of the boot-wim had gone wrong, the source version didn’t match the version on the server. (The solution to this will be posted in a different post, since it’s quite a big job to fix this.) (Can be found HERE)
But after the distribution of the boot-wim was successful to all distributionpoints, the WDS refused to start and gave the error code 2310.

To solve this, I first tried to uninitialize the WDS-server, by starting a cmd as administrator and running the following: “wdsutil /uninitialize-server”

This resulted in the following error:
“An error occurred while trying to execute the command.
Error Code: 0xc1030104
Error Description: The Deployment server role service for Windows Deployment Services has not been configured on the server”

The “Error Description” gave the problem away, so next I ran the following comand:
“wdsutil /initialize-server /reminst:E:RemoteInstall” (Pointing to the location of the remote install folder)
After this I was able to start the WDS-service again.

For some reason, when the distribution of the boot-wim was unsuccessful, it crashed the WDS on the servers as well.

If you are not using SCCM and you are experiencing this issue when the WDS-role has been installed on the server, you might fin an entry in the “Event Viewer” saying that “This shared resource does not exist”
In that case, initialize the WDS-server and point to the location where you would like the RemoteInstall folder to be created. Example: “wdsutil /initialize-server /reminst:D:RemoteInstall”