Deployment Solution

I've just built a new Altiris 6.9 SP6 server for our Windows 7 imaging. It's running on a Server 2012 R2 VM. I have been using Altiris 6.9 SP5 previously but wanted to start a fresh. I have setup the WinPE 4.0 ADK files and imported those files into the PreBoot files also.

 

However when I push our Windows 7 image to a machine, after it is finished and boots back up it gets to the Starting Windows stage, it crashes and then restarts. I have copied over our processes to our new Altiris server so nothing should be different.

 

Any ideas?

You can copy the log files from the panther and sysprep directories to the DS in WinPE, that should tell you why it's failing. Is it a blue screen crash or is there some other message?

Thanks for your response, where abouts are those log files kept sorry?

 

It's not a blue screen, it shows the 'Starting Windows' text then the four balls of light like Windows 7 shows then crashes as they are about to form the Windows logo.

...crashes and then does what? I boot to WinPE and copy: - Everything from c:\windows\panther - Everything from c:\windows\system32\sysprep - *.log from c:\windows to w:\temp\%COMPUTERNAME%

Once it gets stuck on the Starting Windows bit, it then restarts, gets to the option to 'Start Windows Normally' and 'Last Known Good Configuration'. You can then choose whichever option then it's back to the starting windows screen.

 

The only file in my C:\Windows folder is the panther folder then in that is a unattend.xml file. That is all.

If the only file in C:\windows is the panther folder then you must be looking in the wrong place or your image is completely corrupt. When you boot to WinPE the drive letter assignments can change. If you run a PAUSE command in WinPE then press ALT-TAB once it comes up you can use the W: prompt screen o run diskpart and see what disk is what. You can run notepad and look at log files there roo.

If that image I am trying to deploy to a machine was captured with WinPE 2.1 and now I'm trying to deploy the same image with WinPE 4.0. Will that have an effect at all?

No. But if there's nothing in the Windows folder of your image it's never going to boot.

I've now created and captured an image on my new Altiris 6.9 SP6 server with WinPE 4.0 and it all works fine. It just didn't like the image on the old server. I'll just have to create a fresh image for each machine we have.

 

Cheers