Help with TI and Repairing Windows XP Pro

Hello everyone,

I am a tech director of a school district, and we are deploying Windows XP pro, on around 250 laptop computers, for the students. I have just finished up my master image, I backed it up to the secure zone, and then I backed it up again to our network to begin to deploy to the other machines. I restored 2 this morning, and both restored perfectly, however when I rebooted them, they all got to the Windows XP splash screen, flashed a blue screen and rebooted. I do know that to fix this problem, just a simple repair of Windows XP will do the trick, and I should not lose anything, however my problem is, I really do not have the time to repair 250 laptops.

So, I assume in a nutshell, is their anything I can do to avoid having to repair these laptops, or is their any other solutions that may work?

Also, I would like to take the secure zone, and all of the security passwords we have set with Acronis to each laptop. I assume if I just clone the disk, and then active the secure zone on each laptop, these settings will stay correct?

Thank you

 

Bump...I was really thinking I would of had an answer...or at least a response.

 

Once you move a discussion to networked operations, the available maven resources sharply reduces - so it requires more patience.

Can folks assume all of the machines are exactly the same hardware? I reckon it goes without saying but if there are hardware diffs, then a cloned image might not have the right drivers.

 

Another option - before you make the Image, change the display to a Generic VGA type, make the Image and try a restore. After the restore you will have to install the correct display driver for that laptop. This will be quicker than having to do an XP repair if it works.
I don't know if the SZ will be part of the restore since I don't use the SZ at all.

 

Yes we realize that pulling the image, over a school network wont exactly be speedy.

And yes, all laptops are exactly the same.

We used to use Norton Ghost 8.0, so we decided to give that a world. It pulled over the image and everything very speedy, however, same thing, Windows splash screen for a few seconds, and then blue screen, and then restart.

 

See my post on

https://www.wilderssecurity.com/showthread.php?t=193611

for similar topic.

What you are doing works just fine, I have done it on several machines (not 250 though).

Pay particular attention to the SID issue noted in my previous post. It makes machines on the same network domain behave very strangely!

 

What you describe sounds like a drive letter change problem. Getting the splashscreen then rebooting usually means that the registry cannot locate the next startup files to finish the boot cycle due to it looking for them in the wrong drive.

My advice is to download the demo of"paragon justboot corrector" and use that to bootup one of your computers and verify the drive letters. The drive letter needs to be the same as it was on your source hard drive.

With windows xp and true image, I've expierence drive letter changes numerous times. I bought the above program just to change drive letters on my restored drives that don't want to boot. Like you I don't have time to be typing in dos commands to fix a simple drive letter problem. When I need to change a drive letter ,I just boot with the paragon boot cd look for the system partition, and just change the drive letter and reboot. The 2 times that I have actually needed to use it, the restored hard drive booted right up.

Verify your drive letters first to see if that is your problem with the failure to boot. Even if you do fix the network problem, every once in a while you'll run into a drive letter change problem, but they are a easy 5 minute fix.

 

Hello thegame310,

Thank you for choosing Acronis Disk Backup Software.

Could you please clarify what version and build of Acronis True Image are you using? You can find the full version name and build number by going to Help -> About... menu in the main program window.

Thank you.
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Marat Setdikov