Ghost Solution Suite

Hello There,

I hope somebody can help me out with this problem I'm having. After I run deploy anywhere with evaluation and retargeting of drivers being successful, the computer restarts and runs sysprep, right half way through devices installation a message pops up saying Windows can not be installed on this hardware. I'm at a loss here since the retargeting was successful. Any ideas?

I have a pretty simplistic view of error messages - take them at face value until you can prove they are incorrect.  So there has to be a reason that you are getting this error, and the reason has to be something that is preventing the installation of Windows.

Presumably you are able to install Windows 7 on this hardware manually?  (Always good to check this).

If so, do you need to load any mass storage drivers to enable the hard disk subsystem to be seen by Windows ?  My guess in the absence of any specific diagnostic information is that your image is either loading the wrong drivers for the hard disk subsystem, or is not able to load them at all. Since this would result in there being no hard disk to install to, you would get the error message you are seeing.

Mass storage drivers are handled differently within Sysprep to other system drivers which are handled by the  plug and play process.  This is where I would focus your diagnostic attention.

did you make this image on another machine, and maybe you used the 64bit version of Windows, and the target machine does not support that?  You didnt tell us the hardware or anything, so it is something to look at.  

We have had that happen here with our base load going on to really old equipment.  It presents an error like this.  Great way to weed out machines that dont belong anymore!

Ok I did mention that the evaluation procedure and the retargeting itself are completed with success which is confirmed by a clear message at the end and no if I install Windows from scratch there are no drivers that are prompted to be installed. Moreover I have already deployed that same image successfully with Deploy Anywhere procedure on exactly the same computer wich is Lenovo 7638-BC2 for a user another day. Integrity check on the image checks out OK.

It is a ThinkCenter M58 (7638-BC2),  Core 2 Duo Processor E7500, 7200RPM S-ATA HDD. I'm using Win-PE with default drivers and Deploy Anywhere.

The image is Windows 7 (64Bit)

My experience of two apparently identical Lenovo machines is that there can be significant differences. When I was creating images for a large library of Lenovo desktop and laptop machines a couple of years ago, I wrote the utility described here: https://www-secure.symantec.com/connect/articles/readyutility-assist-identifying-plug-and-play-drivers

This gave me a heads up on exactly what devices were present in each machine I worked on. As you may see from the Lenovo driver downloads offered for a specific model, it is not uncommon for network drivers to include Intel and Broadcom, and the video drivers to include AMD and NVidia, so clearly different chipsets are being used in what purports to be the same model.  

Another issue I encountered were differing BIOS releases and more importantly different BIOS settings.  

For example, if you create a build on a Lenovo machine where the bios hard disk settings are in "compatibility mode", and then deploy it to a machine where the bios settings are in "AHCI" mode, the image is unlikely to deploy as the hardware will be expecting SATA drivers to be loaded to provide access to the hard disk where previously the "Compatibility mode" would have forced emulation of the original PATA standard which ALL windows operating systems still support natively.

The fact that you are using WinPE with default drivers is ringing alarm bells in my head, as the version of WinPE supplied with ghost only supported some of the first generation of SATA chipsets and I had to load additional drivers for what were modern machines three years ago.

In summary, for two machines to be identical, they have to have the same revision of motherboard, the same bios version, the same bios settings, the same model and revision of hard disk, the same model and revision of optical drive, the same model and revision of video card, The same model and revision of NIC chipset, the same model and revision of USB chipset, etc.  Just because they have the same model number does not guarantee ANY of these being the same, as the specifications of a model are based on high level parameters such as processor speed and disk capacity and not on chipset versions.

Remember also that the machine vendors buy in parts, and these parts will come in at different revisions as the part manufacturers fix bugs and update their hardware, but as long as the new parts do not materially change the model specification, the vendors are just going to ship the new parts and let you sort out any consequences.

In summary therefore, if a process works on one of two "identical" models but not another, my attention would focus very closely on what is different between these two "identical" models, and I would not exclude the possibility of hardware failure such as a RAM fault either. A lot of time has been wasted by techs over the years where the issue proves to be a dodgy bit of memory.

Thank you EdT for your insight, I happen to realise all of the above yet how can the following be explained, when evaluation and retargeting are successful but imaging is not happening. Retargeting is a pretty straight forward procedure if a driver is missing it won't happen, as simple as that but in my case it is successful. By the way the machines are completely identical from BIOS revision to HD type.

Without knowing the detail of what you have done, I cannot really answer your question about why retargetting is successful but you still get this error. Clearly there is still some problem in the image but it's going to be down to you to track the problem to its source.  I'm going to throw out a few thoughts, with apologies in advance if any appear obvious.

First of all, have you captured both Windows 7 partitions in your Ghost image?  Without the small system partition Windows 7 will not boot, but I've not tried running a sysprepped image with the first partition missing to see how far it gets in mini setup before barfing.

The other thought I have is that the Deploy Anywhere driver database requires you to add the appropriate drivers for the operating system you are deploying, and this driver database is entirely different and separate to the WinPE drivers.

Make sure you don't include different versions of the same driver - as plug and play will use the first device ID "match" it finds in the driver library, and if this happens to be an incompatible driver for your chipset, it's going to throw an error.

However, simple driver mismatches should not prevent windows installing, so there is something more fundamental going on, and I still come back to the question as to whether the BIOS --SETTINGS-- are identical, and not just the versions, and whether your target machine may have a hardware fault.