HP Pro 3000 SFF Imaging Problems

[JasmineTF]

Our school district that has a bunch of Pro 3000 SFF computers. They came with one 160 GB hard drive containing Windows7 as the primary OS, 2 GB of unallocated space, and an eleven GB restoration partition.


The HP restoration DVDs that came with the system and for the system have the capability of rebuilding the system with Windows7, Vista, or Windows XP. We chose to rebuild with Windows XP pro, added all of our network stuff, and then imaged that machine with WimPE.


Now, however, even though the units successfully download the image, they will not boot. We get the menu screen offering to boot into safe mode, safe mode with networking, last known good configuration, or boot windows normally. No matter what choice is made, it just recycles to that point.


We've imaged many different models including HPs, and we've never had this kind of problem. Any ideas?

 

[Silverhazesurfer]

How large of a scale are we talking here? Hundreds?

How have you imaged machines in the past? Have they been this same type of process or a custom built Windows image?

Not jumping to conclusions, but it seems as if the manufacturer imaging process would interfere a bit with any sort of imaging process other than their own. They basically do the same thing to create that image.

Do you have a couple copies of XP to use for test? OEM, Retail, etc. Try booting to Recovery Console and /fixboot or /fixmbr?

 

[JasmineTF]

How large of a scale are we talking here? Hundreds?

How have you imaged machines in the past? Have they been this same type of process or a custom built Windows image?

Not jumping to conclusions, but it seems as if the manufacturer imaging process would interfere a bit with any sort of imaging process other than their own. They basically do the same thing to create that image.

Do you have a couple copies of XP to use for test? OEM, Retail, etc. Try booting to Recovery Console and /fixboot or /fixmbr?

1) I'm talking about a dozen machines that are having this problem.

2) We image machines all the time using WinPE. We've imaged Dells, HPs, Lenovos, Toshibas, etc., all successfully.

3) What we do is take the Operating System that comes with the unit, add all of our network software, links, etc., and then image that. We then deploy that image to all of the units that are identical to the one we imaged. So, the OS, which is the guts of the image, is that of the unit when it boots up out of the box.

4) Amazingly, I was able to restore one of the afflicted units to a working state using the "HP Restore Plus!" DVDs, which are good for Windows7, Vista, and XP pro. You boot up with the first disk, and then you insert the second disk which, in my case, was the XP pro SP3 disk. It runs perfectly. It just won't accept an image made from that OS (plus our usual network stuff that we put on ALL of our images and that have NEVER caused this kind of problem before).

Thanks for taking your time to read and respond with intelligent questions.