Optiplex 755 RIS Infinite Reboot Loop

[jfield]

Hello everyone,

I have spent the last ~2 days trying to get brand new out of the box Dell Optiplex 755s working with RIS. I don't understand how I'm having more problems with this one system than I have with all others Dells I've used with RIS combined.

The problem, as it stands, is this.

I have the Optiplex 755 SATA set to "ATA" or "AHCI", neither matters. I download the image (A fresh one or an existing one with the appropriate drivers in the TEXTMODE folder) by PXE booting to RIS (WDS Legacy mode, its a W2k3 SP2 server). The image downloads perfectly, and then when the system reboots, it goes to the Windows logo and reboots after a few seconds. This happens both with a preexisting image I've updated and with a brand new image I just built on one of these machines. It reboots over and over. If I attempt safemode on the new image, the lockup will reliably occur on either cdrom.sys. I tried disabling the cdrom and it did nothing, I imagine its not cdrom.sys causing this but I suppose it could be.

I'm losing my mind here, and I'm facing Monday with a lab that was supposed to be up this week still down.

Any help would be greatly and truely appreciated. If I get any suggestions I will go in Saturday afternoon and try them out.

Thanks,

-Jeff

[TheReasonIFail]

Sounds like a driver issue.

When you create the image on a 755s, do you still add additional drivers?

[jfield]

Nothing other than the text mode drivers and whatever is in the image itself, but all of it worked on the machine I did the initial riprep from. Something happened between riprep and the image being brought back down. I just can't figure out what.

[jfield]

I just redid the image with no drivers other than what was in the image when I created it, and it is doing the exact same thing. It is like the act of imaging it somehow corrupts the install. Something changes between what the system looks like when I use riprep and what it does when being imaged.

I don't understand. I've imaged hundreds of systems, probably 10 different models of machine, and never had problems like this. I'm at a total loss.

Also, it won't even boot into safe mode (without networking). Doesn't that pretty much eliminate the possibility of it being a driver issue?

Edited November 9, 2008 by jfield

[jfield]

Fixed. So happy.

It looks like what happened was that because this was an image of a machine built on SP2 and then upgraded to SP3, RIS was pulling files from the SP2 flatfile and not the SP3 one. Uninstalled SP3, riprep'd and everything is fine now. I'll just built an SP3 image later, for now WSUS will have to handle it.

Thanks!

[timothysmi]

I'm having the same issue with a Dell Optiplex 360. I can install a base image of Windows XP SP1. The only added drivers I needed were for the Broadcom NIC. Once the image was installed I updated all of the other drivers and all Windows updates including SP3. When I push out the image it seems to go OK until the machine get stuck in an endless reboot cycle. I'm going to try the same steps with all the Windows updates except SP3. I'll post the results in a little while.

Tim

[timothysmi]

Well that did it. I only used SP2 and not SP3 and the image was pushed to the machines without a problem.