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JarrodFlag for Australia

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win 7 sysprep imaged machine stuck in loop computer restarted unexpectedly

Hello experts

I have a win 7 image Ive deployed to well over a thousand pc's that works great. I have two pcs however that will accept the image, get most of the way through and I see the setup is preparing your computer for use message and then I get a message

"The computer restarted unexpectedly or encountered an unexpected error. Windows installation cannot proceed. To install windows, click OK to restart the comptuer and then restart the installation"

So I know its not my image since ive deployed this image not only to over a thousand pc's but 100+ of an identical model. So its a hardware fault of some kind, ive run the windows memory test and it comes back fine, presumably the hard drive isnt too bad as it took an 80gb image without an issue at usual speeds. How can I find the exact bit of hardware causing the problem, is there a straight forward entry in a log that will show this ? After a bit of googling and looking at logs in different places nothing seems to mention exactly what went wrong. Ive reimaged the machines twice and it stops in the same place. There is not thing connected to the machines except keyboard mouse and monitor. For me to log as a hardware fault I need a bit more to go on. Any ideas ?
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FdpxAP-GJL
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Hi,

Have you tried switching the disks with one you know works?

If the image on the disk from the failed machine works on the other that proves what you said above.

If the disk from the good machine boots you could do the build in that machine and switch the disks.

Check bios is same and swap ram over is the best I can come up with.

Regards

Gordon
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I agree, there may be a setting in the bios that may be different between a machine that boots fine and one that does not. It could be a system that is doa
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5g6tdcv4
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Swapping the disks might be a possibility, though Im more interested if this comes up in the future about a better way to pinpoint the failing hardware through the logs to save a bit of time. With the bios settings all are identical, and not a DOA box as the fleet was xp until recently being shifted to win 7 in bulk.

Ill have a look through the logs mentioned in that link (I had seen a similar link in another ms article but it didnt mentioned which phase was which), hopefully it will shed some light on what failed
for the future have a look at ErrorHandler.cmd
It is the script called when win setup encounters errors.
If the script is not found by setup windows just throws out the generic errors
you can customize ErrorHandler.cmd to do whatever you want upon a fatal error
This will get fairly complicated, so it is probably easier to parse the log files yourself since only two machines are failing.


http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh825167.aspx
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Found that the usb controller was bisbevahing on the motherboard, replacing the motherboard resolved the issue as expected. Found this info in the log files after a bit of searching