Ghost Solution Suite

I have a lab full of Gateway E4100's that had been previously ghosted with an image created with Ghost 8.3.  I upgraded to 11.5 some months ago and had been happily ghosting these computers until recently.  I have run some updates to console through LiveUpdate and wonder if something changed for the worse.  Now, any job that reboots the E4100 into the client (PCDOS or Win PE) causes the computer to blue screen once it tries to reboot back into Windows with the message "Unmountable_Boot_Volume".

Here's the course of events.

1.  Image computer using Ghost Cast Server and boot USB, which pushes out image of Windows XP with 8.3 client.  Computer run through set-up and boots normally.

2.  Run Restore Configuration task from the console.  The client updates to 11.5 just fine without any issue and computer reboots.

3.  Computer boots to client (tried this under both PC-DOS and WinPE) and appears to complete normally.

4.  When computer reboots back to Windows, I get the blue screen right away with "Unmountable_Boot_Volume"

Task fails with error file reading: "Error finding Windows installation location.
After lookup:"

Initially, I thought Console was applying a SATA driver (systems use IDE drives but also have SATA ports) through Win PE but then had the same problem through PC-DOS.

If I image the computer again via Ghsot Cast server, I can get it back up and running just fine.

I also tried performing an image create task on an E4100.  Sysprep appears to work just fine, the computer boots into the client, and the image is pulled as normal.  However, both the original computer and any other computer I image through Ghost Cast Server (not using the console) all blue screen quickly after the Windows XP splash first shows - precisely the point where I would normally see a failure if the correct SATA drivers were not available to setup.  The crazy part is that the E4100's all use IDE drives (though they do have some SATA ports on board). 

Console version is 11.5.0.2113

PE Client build is 11.5.0.2141

Thanks in advance for any suggestions.

Hi Joe,

Could you try to run a configuration change task (just applying default configuration) and see if it is working OK? This will boot the system to PreOS and I want to see if it can reboot back if there is no clone task involved. (You may have done this already).

There were changes to this area in LiveUpdate 1, whcih was released around last July. If it was working till recently, it should not be the case.

Unmountable boot volume usually indicates that Windows did not find the Mass Storage device driver. By any chance did you update the BIOS of the machine or made any changes recently? XPSP3 also made changes to this area. Did this started happening with SP3?

"Error finding Windows location" usually comes from GHConfig, which tries to apply configuration. This happens after cloning. Usually the issue is either a corrupted file system or some issue with a device. Do you have any USB devices connected to the system?

Krish

Krish,

Thanks for replying.  Yes, one of my troubleshooting steps was to deploy the image via Ghost Cast and then run a Config Change task seperately.  It failed upon the Config Change task.  I had one incident where I rebooted a freshly imaged machine several times and then the Config Change task worked.  All subsequent Config Change tasks worked on that computer.

I updated and re-pulled the image from this computer and then all future image/config change jobs worked.  I don't like situations that work themselves out without an explaination, but that is what I appear to have.

I have not updated the BIOS nor are there any USB devices attached - beyond a mouse anyways.  The image does include XPSP3 - I know I ran into some problems a little a few months ago but did not heavily troubleshoot since I was in a rush to get the lab up and running (just renamed and attached to domain manually).  It may very well be that the problems surfaced when I included SP3 in the image but I can't 100% confirm that.

 Hi Joe,

Sorry for the delay in replying - I just noticed that the thread is updated.

It is unlikely that SP3 was involved. Usually, this happens when GHConfig could not relate the disk and boot.ini. Was there any possibility that a USB device was connected to the system when it was failing? I have seen some users get this message when the BIOS assign a lower index to the USB.

Krish