reboot loop problem after image

[Tom Skubel]

Hello All,

I am pretty sure this is my first time posting, I maybe posted once when GSS was a Symantec product.  In any case.  

A quick background, I come from many lessons of bad habits.  When I first started I was using DS 6.9 Update 7, which I believe was the last in the series.  It was wildly out of support and most of the things I did were self-taught by trial and error.  Seemed like we were always putting a band-aid on things.  Never just a solid image that worked.  

A couple years ago we finally switched to GSS.  My bad habits continued because I had no real training and wasn't 100% sure what I was doing but I started getting more consistent images.  A few months ago I found a video series on YouTube that was a TON of help!  On Point Drone Works <---- This is a link to his page.

Start reading here if you don't care about back story!! Haha
Anyway, I have run into an issue. I have built my image on a VM and when I roll it back to a VM it works fine runs the whole way through.  When I run it to a physical PC, after the image lays down and the computer begins booting for the first time I get an error.  "The computer restarted unexpectedly or encountered an unexpected error".  A simple fix for this, you can find all over the internet is to launch the registry and change the value of HKLM\System\Setup\Status\ChildCompletion\setup.exe from a 1 to a 3. After the image finished fine. 

It really isn't the most efficient way of imaging to have to change this setting to complete every image.  I have tried a couple of troubleshooting steps and have had really no luck.  I tried to explore the image with Ghost Explorer, but every time I try to open the image Ghost Explorer closes.  I went back to the VM that I used to create the image and the value is a 3.  Next, I went to my test VM the value of setup.exe is a 3.  So this situation only occurs when I roll the image to a physical machine.

One thing I am still doing that is my own creation, before the image starts, I have a Run Script.  Is is a DiskPart script and it just runs a to clean the drive and convert to GPT in the case of UEFI computer or MBR in the case of a legacy computer. (two separate scripts)  However, I ran them against the VM and they didn't cause this problem.

[Blake Thomas]

Hi Tom.

Even though I'm an employee here at Broadcom, our stories are not dissimilar. I've have worked with this product since DS69 myself and most of my experience is trial and error as well. I have only recently come back to being involved in GSS and went through similar searches and YouTube videos to capture Win10 images since it's a whole different beast from how Win7 and XP were so I understand the struggle.

The good news is as of a few weeks ago, I have a working Win10 20h1 image that I captured from a VM that can deploy onto physical hardware successfully.

To get mine to work all the way through, I ended up having to follow this article exactly:
https://knowledge.broadcom.com/external/article?legacyId=tech249488

However, there were a few things that I had to do as well that weren't mentioned in that article:

Don't join it to a domain before you capture it.

I found that I ran into the issue you're seeing when I wasn't licensing the source machine at all. What I found worked was I ended up licensing the source with a multiple activation key (volume licence). When deploying with a GSS task after capture, it seems to work with "USE EXISTING KEY". I'm not sure how this would act when the source machine is captured with a Retail Key.

In short, I ran into that issue when I didn't license the source before capture.

NOTE: I'm not running any diskpart commands before capture or deploy and mine are still successful, so that's probably not part of the issue.

[Nicholas Melkert]

I think it is a little bit of trial and error as well.

HP Elite Book 800 G5 - I know 2004 on this model is failing doing the same steps (confgure windows + apps and sysprep/capture image then restore), I know 2004 works on the HP Elitebook G6 model which  the only difference is the type of M2 HDD. (samsung vs Intel)

We already have 1809 working on the Elitebook G5 which is strange as the steps have no changed.

I will try 1909 on our HP Elitebook g5 model and see what happens (and update). Could be something simply due to the type of Samsung drive (even though its restoring the entire disk as captured)

Nicholas

[Mark Simpkins]

So, I was having the same problem with the "The computer restarted unexpectedly or encountered an unexpected error" on my desktop computers.

I just went from GSS 3.3.3 on 2012R2 to GSS 3.3.6 2016 while defining and using a new database (jobs were exported from the old version while filters, dynamic groups and folders took a while to rebuild by hand)
I work with 5 generations of Dell OptiPlex AIO's in my lab.  (built from 2015 - 2020)
The OptiPlex AIO's with SSD's reimaged without error
The OptiPlex AIO's with HDD gave me our error when the Job was started from the Ghost console.  But, If I manually pulled the jobs down the imaging worked.

I was working with 5 Jobs that were essentially the same with different images with maybe the exceptions that some were 'recompiled' using Ghost explorer and different compression setting may have been used to take different images. (except the 'balanced' was not used ..it caused some difficulties with Ghost Explorer, but I think that is past now)
I tried unicasting the images and multicasting them with the same results.
All Images started from the same Windows 10 x64 1909 EDU build and snapshots using VMWare workstation Pro.
All images were taken by Ghost using the option to SYSPREP with the default answer file (custom files have proven too frustrating for me) and using the correct Windows Key (win 10 x64 edu ..use existing key)

My fix (or so it seems at this point as I do more testing) was to 'uncheck' the 'Selected Image was prepared using Sysprep' in the distributing image task.  It seemed like the only difference between imaging the computers from the ghost console and pulling them down with a bootable USB.

Bizarre, eh?  what could have possibly been the difference between a computer with a SSD vs one with a HDD.  Was (or is)  the sysprep part of the task too much for the computers with the HDD's? 

I may never know,

That, and why SQL 2016 standard version doesn't work after 3.3.3 ??

I hope this might help the next lost pilgrim on the road to imaging nirvana.

Got to go ..much more testing to do, but I'm optimistic.