BSOD after restoring image

[Migration User]

My company just purchased 20 new Dell PC's. I figured it would be best to start using imaging since they will all be the same. Previously we had 4 or 5 different makes and models. I downloaded the trial of ghost and it seemed like it should do the trick so we purchased all 20 licences.

 

I have set up my golden machine how I want it and created an image of it. I used sysprep when creating the image. These machines are also on a domain.

 

Again these machines are all identical but when I try to restore the image to a second machine I am having some problems. The restore process works fine. Then I reboot and windows brings me to the log on screen. I enter my credentials and log in. The pc starts to log in and I can see my desktop but then I get a BSOD. The BSOD is not very helpful, not to me anyway and just says something about a page fault in a non paged area. At the bottom there is no driver mentioned but it does say ntfs.

 

I have tried this several times a couple of times I have gotten into windows but at some point I got the BSOD. Once when going into the Firewall from control panel and at other times somewhat random. After rebooting windows error reporting would come up and after sending the report would say that there is a driver problem. But this does not happen on the original machine that I made the clone from and they have the exact same hardware and drivers. Now it seems to always BSOD on me when I log in.

 

I have done all of the dell hardware tests and the computer passes. I have not yet tried to restore the image to a third machine but I will shortly. I don't know if there is something wrong with this test machine I am using (just my luck) or if there is something wrong with the image. It seems to me like a driver issue of some sort because the dell diagnostics passed. Also due to the error messages mentioned above.

 

Any ideas would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you

[Migration User]

Can you please post details of the Dell models and the OS?

 

One thing you could try is adding a 'Deploy Anywhere' step to the imaging task [or running DA from the command line after laying down the image and before rebooting]  DA may be able to sort out the driver issues.

[Migration User]

"Vostro 200N, Mini Tower Intel Core2 Duo CPU E4600 (2.40GHz 800FSB 2MB L2)"
"2GB DDR2 SDRAM 800MHz, Dual Channel DT"
Dell USB Keyboard
Integrated Intel GMA3100 MNTW/SLTW
"320GB Serial ATA Hard Drive 7200RPM, 16MB Cache"
Dell Scroll Mouse
Integrated 10/100 Ethernet
16X DVD+/-RW Drive
Integrated 7.1 Channel Audio

 

Also we purchased 20 video cards for them for better graphics performance over the integrated graphics that come with the system. So they all have the following cards as well.

 

VisionTek ATI Radeon 256MB X1300 DMS59 SFF PCI-e

[Migration User]

Do you think this has anything to do with sysprep? Maybe if I had not used sysprep it would be fine? Is there any reason why I should or should not use sysprep? What are the advantages and disadvantages?

[Migration User]

i've come across that problem when i put an older image on a new machine without doing the DeployAnywhere steps, almost like it's a HAL problem, or just a hardware problem in general.  It seems weird that you're using an image captured from an identical model.  When you setup your model machine, did you do a quick ntfs format or the full, slow format?  The blue screen, even though they are mostly caused by memory errors, sounds like it's not liking the file system.

[Migration User]

and if you're using deployanywhere, did you add the new video drivers to the driver database?

[Migration User]

I am not using deploy anywhere because they are all identical brand new machines. Also I didn't not format the drive myself. The computers came with windows on them from dell. I just installed several of our programs on them and uninstalled some stuff dell put on then cloned. The idea was that I would only have to do this once instead of 20 times. Also all of the windows updates were done. All the usual stuff.

 

Interestingly though it looks as though the first pc i tried to deploy my image too may have some defective hardware in it because I tried it on another one and everything is working fine. So maybe that was it. I am going to try to clone to all 20 soon and that will let me know I guess if they all work fine but this one.