Ghost Solution Suite

Ghost: 11.5 (not sure of the patch level)

OS: Windows 7 / Windows XP

Hardware: Dell Inspiron 6510

I have taken several sysprep'd images from our Inspiron 6510s for different departments with different builds that have all completed successfully win Windows XP and 64 bit Windows 7.

When I deploy these to new 6510s when they come in from Dell they process completes successfully, but when I boot up it restarts part of the way through the boot process, before the setting up your new computer screens. However, if I deploy the image again, everything works fine.

I am booting from CD and restoring from a locally attached USB drive. Beyond the annoyance factor is the time issue since the images take 30-40 minutes to restore.

Any ideas?

Thanks,

Clark

Couple of questions:

1. Please go and check the patch level as it has a bearing on Windows 7 support.

2. How are you creating the two partitions required by Windows 7? Are you imaging "by disk" rather than "by partition" ?

1. I've updated the Ghost server to 11.5.1.2266 so that may help with the Windows 7 restores, but this was also happening with a Windows XP restore.

2. I am doing the imaging "by disk"

What is the status of the hard disks before you start imaging the first time?

I am totally speculating, but if the disks are totally wiped and do not come up as a drive letter at the point they are first imaged, then the boot information (such as boot.ini in XP) may not be correct for the end result. After the first image, the next time you boot the system, the hard disk now appears with a drive letter, and this time the image correctly deploys.

You mention that you are booting from CD, but do not mention whether you are booting WinPE or DOS.  I suspect the former as DOS does not easily support USB devices, so once WinPE is booted, can you go to a command prompt, select C: and check whether you are seeing the hard disk of the machine, or seeing the CDROM?

If the machines have SATA disks, what are your bios settings for the hard disk when imaging? DOS does not understand SATA, so you would need to set ATA compatibility mode in the bios to make the hard disk resemble an IDE device rather than native SATA.

The machine's we're imaging are new from Dell, so they have a full OS loaded before we do anything.

We are using the Ghost boot disk with whichever OS is on that.

After the image is successfully loaded the first time the computer does start the boot process. If I start in safe mode I can see it load the first 25-30 drivers before it restarts. In normal mode I do see the Windows logo screen. It seems that the reboot happens about the time when the sysprep'd image would start it's new computer build process.

If I am not mistaken, DELLs ship with a recovery partition as well as a boot manager and the two Windows 7 partitions.  So the problem may be caused by your process not clearing all existing partitions before imaging, thus requiring a second imaging process to finish the job.

Again, there is an element of speculation as I don't know the details of your process, but given this latest bit of information, I would suggest a test where you nuke all existing DELL partitions and then try your image deployment on a totally clean disk.