Strange thing happened: I installed WDS on a server 2008 r2 machine which had just a base install. The installation zipped through in about 15 seconds. No icon showed up in the administrative tools menu, and my event viewer had this error:
An error occurred while trying to start the Windows Deployment Services server. Error Information: 0x906
Upon investigation, it looks like the 0x906 error relates to the WDS not being initialized properly.
I rebooted, uninstalled, rebooted and ran the install again. No luck, same error.
I decided to hit the command line and uninitialize the WDS, then reinitialize it. This worked.
wdsutil /uninitialize-server
wdsutil /initialize-server /reminst:[path-to-wds-images]
Some times it baffles me. oh well.