Ris / Disk Boot Failure

[meninblack]

I am currently setting up 100+ new PC's using RIS from Windows 2003 Server. Everything goes fine until various PC's report a disk boot failure after the imaging has finished.

There is no pattern as to which fails and all the hardware is the same in each PC.

Out of 70 PC's, 18 have reported a disk boot failure.

Any idea's

Thanks

 

[newBPhoneGuy]

im not fimiliar with RIS but soulds like something was corrupted durring the install. try re-installing.

 

[meninblack]

Won't work.

Once a PC has the disk boot failure, that's it, the PC keeps failing after the image.

 

[JBowser]

I have seen similar problems when doing installs on multiple machines using Symantec Ghost. This problem can usually be corrected by booting from a boot disk and running chkdsk /f on the drive.

Joshua M. Bowser
Systems/Network Engineer

 

[jwalker107]

Windows generates several logfiles during Windows Setup. You'll need to either use the Windows Recovery Console, or a third-party "Windows on CD" type tool. I use BartPE, a freeware tool from

http://www.nu2.nu,

to generate a working copy of Windows that runs off the CD to troubleshoot this kind of stuff.

Once you get into the system's hard drive, look for \Windows\setupact.log, \Windows\setupapi.log, and \Windows\setuperr.log. Comparing these files between a client that works and one that doesn't may shed some light on this. It gets down to the level of showing which PnP Device ID's it found, and which drivers it loaded for each device.

I had an instance where 2/3 of my RIS downloads failed out of 50 clients in one day. It turned out to be a bad NVidia video driver at the time. You may find you need to switch SCSI or chipset drivers in your RIS download.

The setupapi.log file may show you that your SCSI driver is loading on some clients, but not on others. Sometimes the PC vendors make slight revisions to their hardware, even for machines bought in the same procurement, and sometimes that means a new driver or a higher rev of the driver is needed.


Are you using Windows Setup in RIS (scripted install), or RipREP images (image-based copy)?