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XP w/SP3 - BSOD after sysprep applies


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Hi,

Normally I'm pretty good with this sort of stuff, having followed the unattended guides for XP since about 2005, but I'm at a wall that I've been stuck at for a week now and I'm under a heap of pressure to get it fixed ASAP. I'm summarising what I've done so far here, and might miss a step or two that I've gone through but thanks in advance for taking the time to read this and any responses that you care to give.

We've already purchased the new desktops, which are Dell Optiplex's and I built the new SOE first by slipstreaming SP3 into our XP install CD, installed the required apps, tested that they all ran and everything was looking good. For operational reasons we are going with XP + SP3 as our new SOE. Did a test rollout to 8 users and discovered an application problem with our document management system, which, after weeks and weeks of troubleshooting with the vendor, turned out to be related to SP3 not installing terminal services when slipstreamed into the XP disk – this software has a dependency on one of the terminal services DLL (that isn't mentioned in its release notes, however).

So last week when this was discovered I went back to the start, installed XP with SP2 from our original disk, manually installed SP3, then all the available windows updates, installed the applications, tested that the troublesome application works (which it did) and started cleaning up the install for sysprep and imaging.

Once sysprepped I took an image of the machine using Novell Zenworks Imaging (FYI it works very similarly to Ghost) and then deployed it and the add-on Zenworks images which are required for the SOE. Once that all completed I expected the machine to come up with the mini-setup part that I'm used to and be ready for user testing (this was on Monday). Unfortunately, the machine has blue-screened as windows was loading for the first time.

Being the smart cookie that (i like to think that) i am, I took an image of the machine as it stands before sysprepping it – in case it turned out that I needed to change something in the sysprepped image that was revealed in user acceptance testing. So I rolled back to this image and changed the option to automatically restart on BSOD, re-sysprepped the image and took another image. Same result – but now I know what the blue-screen is saying. It's a stop error 0x00000024 which seems to be related to NTFS.SYS – so using ImageExplorer (similar to GhostWalker but for Novell Zenworks Images) I took a working NTFS.SYS file out of a working image (the previous image I had created which had the application problem) and updated the image file with a working NTFS.SYS. Unfortunately this has had no effect – I'm still getting the same BSOD after everything completes.

I thought this could be to do with the sysprep options i've been using (use mini-setup, detect nonPNP hardware, reseal) so I tried without detecting nonPNP hardware. No change...

I'm under a fair bit of pressure to get this complete and rolled out at the moment, we've had the machines since just before the start of the new financial year and the Finance department are whinging that we're taking too long on deploying them (I want to tell them all to die in a fire but my manager says I can't!). Can anyone suggest some things for me to try with regards to this? I'm literally bashing my head against a wall here.

Help!!!

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I'm actually leaning toward it being a problem with Zenworks Imaging now...

... I reapplied the pre-sysprepped image to the machine, sysprepped it, then booted it without taking an image again - and it booted. So something (a driver, I suspect) is being corrupted when Zenworks is taking the image of the sysprepped machine.

No idea how to fix it though... but i'll keep on truckin' ;)

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Actually it might be an issue with either the source or destination hard drive. I normally use Ghost for my imaging, (at least in the recent past, switch to WIMs recently), but every time I had this error during imaging or later after a machine had been deployed we found that the hard drive(s) were in a state of failure.

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It might be worth installing and capturing with imagex (or use MDT to automate the build and capture) and see if that changes things. If you're getting a stop 0x24 in ntfs.sys right after sysprep, and you know the drive is kosher, then most likely the disk driver or a disk filter driver (antivirus, maybe?) could be getting corrupted during the imaging process - any crash in a disk filter driver or disk controller driver is going to show as "ntfs.sys" during a BSOD.

Considering you can drop a non-sysprep'ed image down without issue, I would say most likely your imaging is suspect, and finding a viable workaround (imagex, WDS, MDT, etc) might be a better choice long-term.

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