Windows 11 Pro Remote Wipe Failing with General Error on Hexnode; Anyone else seeing this?Solved

Hey Steve, I am willing to bet this machine has an 11th, 12th, or 13th Gen Intel processor under the hood?

If so, the culprit is almost certainly the Intel VMD (Volume Management Device) or Intel RST technology embedded in those newer chips. Here is what is happening behind the scenes: when an MDM/UEM triggers the wipe command, it tells the PC to reboot into the Windows Recovery Environment (WinRE) to perform the actual reset.

Because you formatted the PC using the generic Microsoft Media Creation Tool, your hidden WinRE partition lacks the specific Intel VMD storage drivers. WinRE boots up, is completely blind to the NVMe storage drive because it cannot communicate with the controller, and just aborts the reset. That is why Hexnode receives that generic failure code; the recovery environment literally cannot see the disk it is supposed to wipe.

Yes, these are Lenovo laptops running 12th Gen Intel chips! I did not know about the WinRE partition missing the storage controller drivers.

Since the generic Microsoft USB does not include those drivers, how did you get around it? Did you have to manually mount the WinRE image and inject the drivers via command line, or is there a less tedious functioning workaround?

You could go the manual route and inject the Intel RST drivers into your WinRE image, but there is a much easier fix since you are working with Lenovos.

You just need to re-image the PC using the official manufacturer tool; in your case, the Lenovo USB Recovery Creator. When you use the official OEM image instead of the generic Microsoft one, it already has the specific Intel VMD drivers baked into both the main OS and the WinRE environment.

I had to do the exact same thing. After reinstalling the OS with the manufacturer image and re-enrolling the device in Hexnode, the native remote wipe button worked flawlessly. Just keep this in mind going forward; this will affect any client using these newer Intel chips regardless of the manufacturer, so always use the OEM image to save yourself the troubleshooting time!