Hi Appa, thank you for the reply.
1. as far as I can tell all the build numbers are 11.5.1.2266
2. we formated this USB drive today
3. if we attempt to create the image locally on the laptop or using slave/master it still presents the same error. - using the agent + console does not work either, it just hangs and we have to manually cancel it.
4. we attempted to use WinPE earlier today however we have never used it before and we seemed to have alot of network issues which i assume is to do with incorrect network drivers.
As a side note, we have successfully ghosted Identical machines in the past