Sysprepping HII GX260 with continuous reboots after.

[billium]

Ok, I have spent a few months banging my head at locating drivers for all the laptop/workstation models I support. Ok, so now I think I have them. Now I basically have an image I have created from scratch, loaded all software, cleared device path in the registry, amended the sysprep OemPnPDriversPath to point to where later, and uninstalled all hw specific drivers. I will extract the drivers into the specified folder after the ghost imaging is done. It had started working fine, now all of a sudded when I sysprep the computer for the HII, I allow it to start back up. It finishes sysprep then says windows did not start normally and continually reboots. I hit safe mode, last one to load is agp440.sys. I know for sure there isn't any external hardware plugged in. How can this be? How can a computer that you get the create the universal image not load all its devices and start back up? I have another (laptop D600) that always asks for ati2mtag.sys file when its sitting under its nose! Weird.. Thanks for any advice anyone could give.!!

[IcemanND]

Likely you are getting a bsod on the hard disk controller driver missing.

[billium]

Thanks for the reply. Let me ask this, during sysprep, when you check detect pnp hardware, will it redetect everything, including onboard motherboard hardware, like video for example?~bill

[IcemanND]

Yes it should, and assuming it can access all of the folders in your devicepath and the drivers are signed and laid out correctly it should install them.

There is a limit to the length of the devicepath string in the answer files.

[billium]

The weird thing is even if I set up a machine and sysprep it, then restart, it runs through the setup, then gives the "windows did not start.." Even when you leave everything installed in device manager. It can't restart even if you ran sysprep from the exact machine! I don't get bsod, just black screen reboot btw. ~bill

[billium]

OK, I figured out the problem. In the sysprep inf I was using the syntax: OemPnPDriversPath = "dell/drivers;%systemroot%\inf", which I read should work, but it never did. So I back-tracked, removed that entry, and basically hardcoded it into the device path string with: c:\Dell\drivers;%systemroot%\inf, and all is good. All models are finding the drivers in the appropriate drivers folder from these locations. Iceman Thanks for your responses! So basically I have a 260 successfully imaged to work on 270, 280, 320, 520, 330 (in progress) and a D600 working on 610, 620,630. Yayuh!

[billium]

Oh yeah, Opti 620,745, 755. All with SP3 btw.~bill