I was on site with a customer today building some Surface Pro 3 devices using Operating System Deployment in System Center Configuration Manager 2012 R2.

The devices were booting from USB Boot Media, however when searching for task sequences the following error message appeared – An error occurred while retrieving policy for this computer (0x80004005). For more information, please contact your system administrator or helpdesk operator.

Checking the SMSTS.log file, I discovered that the time and date stamps in the log seemed to be a few days old and I had come across a previous issue where if the time and date on the device were out, the task sequence would not run. I therefore decided I would have a look in the UEFI BIOS and check the time and date – only problem is on the Surface Pro 3, you cannot set the date and time in the UEFI BIOS.

To get round this issue, I opened the command prompt by pressing F8 during Windows PE (ensure you have Command Support Testing enabled) and used the date and time commands to reset the date and time to the current values, rebooted and the task sequence ran successfully.

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