WinPE ISO created on Win11 Ent IoT not working.

I have upgraded all of my systems to Windows 11 Enterprise IoT 24H2 because it's less bloated and runs very fast and smooth.

However, I have encountered an issue which may be caused by this particular version of Windows. I am a long-time user of Veeam. Whenever I build a new system, or update Veeam on a PC, I always run the Veeam Media Creation tool (on the PC) and create a new bootable ISO which is customized with the drivers for that PC.

Yesterday, I tried to boot from the Veeam ISO and perform a bare metal restore but I could not connect to the Veeam server. After hours of testing, I've narrowed the problem down to the ISO's which were created on PC's with Windows 11 Enterprise IoT 24H12. ISO's created on Windows 11 Enterprise 22H2 are fine.

The ISO's created by the Veeam Media Creation tool are WinPE.

Is Windows Enterprise 24H2 and/or Windows 11 Enterprise IoT 24H12 missing something that's causing an issue when creating the ISO's? In other words, does WinPE ISO creation rely on the OS it's being created on or is the process completely independent from the host PC's OS?

UPDATE:

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I just performed a fresh install of Windows 11 Enterprise LTSC 24H2 (non-IoT) and created a new Veeam recovery ISO. It worked!

So it seems that this issue only affects the IoT edition of Windows.

After more testing, I find that the issue is not related to the IoT edition. This issue occurs on both IoT and non-IoT systems that have the 3/2025 Windows update. On fresh Windows 11 Enterprise LTSC 24H2 installs, that do not have any Windows updates, the issue does not occur on IoT nor non-IoT editions.

March 2025 CU is when MS began new enforcement of the vulnerable drivers blocklist. Check if your network driver is really outdated (by release date).

@garlin - Thanks for your suggestion. The drivers are OK. I can even ping the server when this issue occurs. I do get this error when the issue occurs and I try to connect a second time: