Ghost problem

[Jobos]

The other week we took delivery of 15 Toshiba A200 laptops. Ghosting these should be a simple matter but I’m having great trouble with them.

 

Firstly I tried using an image I made last year with a similar Toshiba laptop. From the outside they identical so it was worth a try. I booted with the latest ultimate boot CD and applied the image. On rebooting the machine kept restarting over and over. Next was to reinstall windows over the top of the image but after booting from the windows CD it complained it couldn’t find any hard drives. The machine comes with a recovery DVD but on running, it completely over rights the HD thereby loosing my image.

 

I don’t want to install all the programs from scratch as there are loads and I’ll be at it all week. All I need is to be able to boot from a windows cd!

 

 

Someone fetch me a small child… I need to kick something...

[Michael]

It sounds as though these new laptops have completely different chipsets to your existing models. It could well be the case that your older laptops are single core processors, whereas a lot of new machines are dual core. It's all down to the Windows HAL.

 

Although there are methods to use a single image across multiple hardware, I'd never recommend it myself. It's always better (and easier longterm) to create different images for every model of hardware.

[Geoff]

Is the SATA option set correctly in the BIOS?

[srochford]

It's almost certainly not the HAL but the IDE controller that's the problem. Your new laptops probably have SATA drives; the older ones might have had EIDE or SATA but with a different controller.

 

One quick thing to check; is AHCI enabled in the BIOS? If so, can you turn it off? This may let the machine start and you can then re-enable it later.

 

If that isn't the case then you need to add the IDE driver to the image file. This article on the My PKB blog shows the basics of what to do but it's a bit more complex when you have a Ghost image rather than a WIM file.

 

What you do is to copy the image onto the machine in the normal way but don't reboot it. Instead, boot the machine from a BartPE or UltimateBootCD. This will give you access to the C: drive and the registry hives.

Run regedit and use Load Hive to open the file c:\windows\system32\config\system - load it to HKEY_USERS and call the loaded file temp; it will then fit with the .reg file you're going to make.

Boot a working laptop (you have still got one that works, haven't you - if not, just recover it!) and find out what drivers are needed and create the reg file. Import that reg file as shown on the "My PKB" blog, copy the necessary files and restart the machine.

 

The other alternative (which I'm just about to try!) is to use the BartPE plugin called FixIDE; it's also mentioned in the blog above.

[Jobos]

Cheers... whoever said it was going to be easy