You are correct, the one working T5500 is an existing installation of Win 7-64 that came preloaded on the workstation from the factory. This T5500 was purchased maybe a year or so ago from Dell. When these workstations came in I created a working WinPE virtual partition PreOS, created a master image and cloned all 35 of them no problem.
Now to today, we receive a new T5500 with the same OS installed from the factory(Win 7-64). When I try to use my previously working WinPE virtual partition PreOS to create my master image the process fails with the above mentioned error on the server.
Yes I have reviewed many other threads and tried all of the suggested solutions before I ever started this thread. None of the posted suggestions worked except for using PCDOS.
The main reason I started looking into this is that I have 215 workstations coming in that will need to be imaged and I wanted to be able to use WinPE as it images much faster than PCDOS can. I have been using Ghost to create workstations for the past 8 years going back to using a boot disk, an external USB hard drive and going around cloning one workstation at a time. I started using the GSS running on a server when the workstation count got too great to clone one at a time and have had hundreds of successes using both PCDOS, and before now, WinPE. Don't get me wrong, I have had plenty of issues during all of this but it seemed like there was always a workaround when things wouldn't work.
I have been working on this newest problem (failed to update unattend.xml) for about 2 weeks now off and on and I'll be damned if I can figure it out. The workstation has a Broadcom NetExtreme 57xx Gigabit Controller for the NIC and a Intel ICH8R/ICH9R/ICH10R/DO/5 Series/3400 Series SATA RAID Controller for the disk. I have tried using different Vista drivers for these in my WinPE virtual partition PreOS and even reordered the manifest to check drivers before trying to update the unattend.xml to get driver errors reported:
{
name = "WinPE-512"
type = PEx86
size = 190
ram = 440
bootonce = 1
steps = (
# Check that drivers are present in winpe for the devices on the client
{what = checkDrivers, path = "{manifest}\\pci.manifest.txt"}
# Update the unattend.xml file with any required static ip settings
{what = unattend, path = "{manifest}\\ghost\\unattend.xml"}
This worked to report on a incorrect Ethernet driver but no SATA errors are ever reported.
I can not think of anything else to try.