After deploying image, computer fails to boot Windows 7.
This is occurring on a Lenovo ThinkPad W520. Instead of booting, when bios is finished the laptop just loads a black screen with a blinking cursor. No boot loader starts. This has happened twice now. I'm able to get the machine back in good working order with the Lenovo recovery disks I made prior to deploying the image, but this is a huge amount of time wasted.
Making the image took a reasonable amount of time, but the deployment process took 8 hours, and then left me with a brick instead of a working laptop.
Repairing the MBR worked, everything worked quite nicely after that.
Still would like to find a way to make it not necessary to repair the MBR after deploying an image though.
Also, what needs to be done so that deploying an image doesn't take 8 hours?
Thanks for your help, I very much appreciate it.
Rich
Hello Rich,
Thank you very much for replying and I am happy that the issue has been resolved.
I checked the Acronis report and there are some file system errors on the disk with the OS. It could be one of the reasons why your system did not boot.
Also, I would like to know how exactly the master image was created and how it was deployed. It is possible the Lenovo service partition was resized or it became corrupted.
Did you deploy using the standalone utility or via the PXE server? Sometimes changing network utilization settings under tools->options->network utilization and toggling between multicast/unicasts allows you to speed up the deployment.
Looking forward to your reply and if you have additional questions please let me know.
Thank you.
Hello Anton,
I created the master image using a beta version of the boot utilities that was provided to me by your support staff on live chat. The currently released version was unable to install drivers for the network card on these laptops.
The beta version of the boot utilities is also what I used to load the standalone snap deployment agent, which is how I connected with the deployment server, and from there pushed the image. I was using multicast at the time, and have since switched to unicast, and hopefully that will make a difference.
Another question I have is this. I have tried to deploy images twice now with two separate images. One of them only imaged the windows partition, and the other one had all three. In both situations the laptop wouldn't boot after. Why is it re-sizing partitions in both scenarios?
Thank you much for all your help.
Rich Cates
Hello Rich,
Thank you for replying.
To answer your last point, there is an option in the deployment template called disk space utilization. If you select 'as in master image' no resize will be made.
Please let me know if you need additional help.
Thank you.