Sysprep'ed image stops working

[Almeida80]

HI Guys.

Im new to sysprep and imaging a system.

what i do is i get a system build i then sysprep it. and make a wim image.

i manage to build 2 laptops fine but when i get to the 3rd it blue screens, after the 1st initial mini-setup section.

It seems like the image gets corrupted has anyone come across the issue.

thank you. any help would be greatful

[ricktendo]

Do all these laptops have the EXACT same hardware?

Edited April 14, 2011 by ricktendo64

[IcemanND]

What is the BSOD?

[Almeida80]

Hi

they are all the same model and hardware

whats BSOD, sorry very new to sysprep

[Almeida80]

sorry just woke up and realised what BSOD is.

the BSOD is so quick i cant see what it says

[IcemanND]

The two most common BSOD when deploying an XP image to a machine especially when deploying to hardware that is different from the master system are 0x0000007B, which is a missing mass storage controller driver you can fix this if you add the hard disk controller drivers in the [sysprepMassStorage]section of the sysprep.inf file.

The other is an incompatible HAL on the target system. Don't recall the BSOD code on this one since I have not seen it in a very long time. Windows XP installs one of seven different HALs on a machine, of those seven there are two pairs of them that Microsoft supports changing between, there are scripts online that let you switch between more of them. In my experience if you build you machine on a machine that is an Uniprocessor ACPI HAL when you drop it to a machine that would use a multiprocessor ACPI HAL it upgrades on its own. There was a period of time when the Intel Chipset and BIOS manufacturers conspired against me and this did not work.

[Almeida80]

but surely if it was those 2 issues, it wouldn't let me build 2 machines(they work fine) but after that it keeps on BSOD

[IcemanND]

depends on the hardware configuration of the machines in question. If they are the same manufacturer and base model it will work fine. And even if they are different manufacturers and models if they are form the same generation of machines it will work 90% of the time. The problems arise when you start imaging machines that are newer or older than your base system model.

In my case instead of throwing my time and headaches at it we purchased the Universal Imaging Utility which adds drivers to the image and handles the HAL swapping. It is made by the same company that originally created Ghost, Binary Research. I was tasked with making a single image that could be deploying to a 6 years span of XP compatible hardware on top of the rest of my duties. BTW Windows 7 has greatly simplified this process, no more HAL issues and so far I have not run into any MSD issues though I know some people have but all of the hardware I support have Intel chipset and mass storage controllers.

[Almeida80]

there are about 47 of them all same mode and make all the same hardware. just gets me that the image will only build 2 laptops and then BSOD

[IcemanND]

Reset the BIOS to defaults on the failing machine and see if it works.

[Almeida80]

i will give that a go. i think its something that sysprep does. Cos i've been able to create a image and apply it to about 10 laptops. if i don't sysprep it.

is there a problem with sysprep and using gimagex to create a .wim image?

[IcemanND]

I don't use gimagex but from what I remember it does not do anything other than give you a GUI front end to run imagex. I capture all of my images manually using imagex and deploy them with my own custom imagex frontend and have no issues.

[Almeida80]

Could it be the version of Sysprep im using. i downloaded the latest of Microsoft website

[Tripredacus]

You should use the version of Sysprep kept in the deploy.cab on the XP install media. XP sysprep is version dependent, which is probably why Microsoft decided to include sysprep in their OSes starting with Vista.

[Almeida80]

ah that could be it then