Help Capturing XP Images with VMware & Redploying with ImageX

[andym2508]

Hello,

I am trying to recapture my legacy .gho images as.wim.

For the machines I had available I was able to apply .gho - update - sysprep - capture via wds to network & usb hd with success.

However on the unavailable machines I set up an IDE VM using Workstation 7, applied the .gho rebooted then recaptured using wds but only saving to USB HD.

As a result of this I created a 16 image wim file.

When I apply the images which I taken from the physical machines it works fine, however when I apply the images I recaptured from the VM, upon boot I get the following error message:

Windows could not start because of a computer disk hardware configuration problem.

Could not read from the selected boot disk. Check boot path and disk hardware.

Please check the Windows documentation about hardware disk configuration and your hardware reference manuals for additional information.

Upon further investigation I realised that the local C drive does not contain boot.ini, ntdetect.com or ntldr

I have a feeling that its probably something to do with the manufacturers diagnostic partitions which have been captured along the way!

Is there something 'schoolboy' I have missed out here?

Any help would be appreciated, before I embark on another mammoth task next week!

thanks

A

[jaclaz]

Upon further investigation I realised that the local C drive does not contain boot.ini, ntdetect.com or ntldr

I have a feeling that its probably something to do with the manufacturers diagnostic partitions which have been captured along the way!

Is there something 'schoolboy' I have missed out here?

If you get the message you posted you do have *somewhere* a NTLDR+NTDETECT.COM+BOOT.INI.

The contents of BOOT.INI are needed to understand if there has been *somehow* a "shift" in partition numbering (and consequently in ARCPATH).

The message could also be related to drivers (that you have installed in the VM) that are (obviously) not capable of reading/accessing the disk on the "real" machine, but that should have produced a BSOD 0x0000007b.

You might need to re-generalize the image or however check the Registry to see if the "right"drivers are installed and/or if the /MountedDevices key has remnants referring to an old disk signature or different LBA start of the partition.

Also it is possible that besides partition order also (still *somehow*) disk order has been changed.

jaclaz

[andym2508]

Upon further investigation I realised that the local C drive does not contain boot.ini, ntdetect.com or ntldr

I have a feeling that its probably something to do with the manufacturers diagnostic partitions which have been captured along the way!

Is there something 'schoolboy' I have missed out here?

If you get the message you posted you do have *somewhere* a NTLDR+NTDETECT.COM+BOOT.INI.

The contents of BOOT.INI are needed to understand if there has been *somehow* a "shift" in partition numbering (and consequently in ARCPATH).

The message could also be related to drivers (that you have installed in the VM) that are (obviously) not capable of reading/accessing the disk on the "real" machine, but that should have produced a BSOD 0x0000007b.

You might need to re-generalize the image or however check the Registry to see if the "right"drivers are installed and/or if the /MountedDevices key has remnants referring to an old disk signature or different LBA start of the partition.

Also it is possible that besides partition order also (still *somehow*) disk order has been changed.

jaclaz

This one has thrown me - but it was an experiment to save time and effort of having to find these old machines!

When I type bootcfg at a cmd prompt it says boot.ini is not present.

I think the confusion has somehow cropped up from the original presence of the Dell Diagnostic partition and therefore the numbering as you suggested.

Obviously before applying the image I ran the standard diskpart script for just one partition etc.

There wasn't a BSOD like you get when booting an ATA build with the sata operation set to AHCI, i was actually quite impressed with such a clean error message!

I wasn't booting into windows on the VM once image applied, I was doing all the work in Win7pE - If I tried to boot some of the intel based images up in VMWARE they would just bluescreen anyway.

I think tomorrow I will build a new legacy image from scratch (without diag partition) then try recapturing it through VMware

thanks for your input, much appreciated!