Dell Optiplex 740 XP STOP 7F BsoD

[kesomir]

Got a bunch of Optiplex 740 with the 5400B Procs (23).

Every single one I've unwrapped so far BSODs on startup with a 7F stop.

I'm running the ubuntu ram check on one - no issue yet, 2 passes (still running overnight).

After blue screening on startup (from the windows loading screen), they reboot and start over, after several repeats of this (a different number of times) they eventually startup fine, reach the login page and all seems to work fine from there.

All devices appear ok - this is straight on reboot from unbox, tick the windows OEM first run buttons to desktop. Other than booting seems to run no problems, so I'm wondering if it's driver related in the image dell have used..

ideas?

I don't really want to have to rebuild all these stations (it's an XP Pro downgrade from Vista Business btw). I've unboxed and tried 15 so far and expect the rest to be exactly the same.

My next move after speaking to retail is to try a fresh install of XP, and see how that goes and if no dice, then try a vista one.

[Michael]

It does indeed sound like an image/driver problem, for the simple fact it's happening on all the machines as soon as you switch them on.

Whenever I receive batches of new machines, they always get re-imaged anyway. OEMs always install unnecessary software or even worse demo software which is a pain to uninstall manually.

Although it's additional work initially, months down the line you'll thank yourself because everything will still be running as it should.

[kesomir]

After running all the diagnostics I could, I bit the bullet and used my dell xp pro oem media to perform a fresh install - guess what - no bsod.

Going to slowly add drivers one by one until everything works. Then I need to learn how to create an image with sysprep that retains the oem no activation doo-dah.

[Michael]

Glad it's worked. There are lots of articles on this forum regarding sysprep and imaging. If you need any further help, let me know.

[kesomir]

Whats the recommended free distribution method?

I'm thinking it must be either the built in windows one (WDS)?? or something built on linux | partimage or dd to pull an image and deploy. Prob with that is that it wont resize based on available hard disc size and I question the size of the images.

I have no budget for ghost et al.

[todav]

We use WDS and find it extremely good for a free product. It does have some limitations, such as not having much flexibility to alter an image once it has been created, but considering it is free, I'm not complaining.

Just imaged 120 new Optiplex 740s with XP and they are working fine. If you do use network imaging software you must update the BIOS to the latest one first, as the network card is otherwise liable to drop the machine off the network and not reconnect. Was starting to get pretty stressed until we figured this one out...

[FN-GM]

Just wondering how you got on with this please?