attempting to boot from hard drive (c:) after unattende deployment

[fluidville]

I am trying to deploy windows 2003 using the RDP solution of unattened, it goes through the motions of copying the oem files, distribution files and merging the unattend.txt. after which it kickes off the OS install, of which intiates and starts installing windows 2003 STD/ENT, after the first reboot it attempts to boot into the C: to continue the installation process.

This is where the problem occurs, I am getting to the point of "attempting to boot from hard drive (c:)" and it just hangs.

On occasion it does go through, but a majority of the time it does not, (perplexing).

I have a range of HP servers that I am using, and the problem seems to be specific to servers with 53xx / 64xx controllers - ML370G4 and ML570 G3.

The process seems to work fine on the new flavour of HP servers - P400 controllers.

I have tried clearing the NVRAM of the servers and setting the controller boot order. all the windows temp dir's seems to be there $win_nt$.~bt and .~ls.

Not sure if anybody else has come across this issues or could point me in the right direction, but it is starting to get quite frustrating now.

using RDP 3.81 by the by.

[Gordon Leonard]

Does the ML370G4/ML570G3 have a SCSI controller? I was having issues with an older server...not sure if it's the same issue. If you do disable it (go into the BIOS and remove the IRQ from it).

Also you may want to update the System ROM and the RAID ROM to see that fixes the issue.

Firmware Maintenance CD (8.30 â Nov 18, 2008)

http://h18004.www1.hp.com/products/servers/proliantessentials/foundationpack/downloads.html

[Moderator edit: Removed the broken link. Please refer to https://support.hpe.com/]

[fluidville]

Gordon,


Many thanks for your post, but I think I may have found out what my issue was.

as we are running bespoke jobs akin to what HP intergration module uses, the job that I was using was not deploying the Hardware configuration step just prior to downloading the NTFS image. it seems this job specifies what OS is being installed with in the BIOS.

I have placed that task in the process and all seems to be working fine now.


Cheers

[Goldyfarbs]

Fluidville,

I am experiencing the same issues. What was the exact fix for this issue?

Am I not doing something with Conrep?

[fluidville]

Goldyfarb,


You are on the right lines with the conrep, I found in my case there was an input file found in deployment share\lib\hwconfig\system called "pl-win.xml" this is called by conrep prior to droping the ntfs.img in the deployment process.

this sets in the bios of the server the type of OS being deployed, and for some reason if this is not set it will fail to deploy.

You need to make sure that this .xml is dropped, this file is generic to the HP version of altiris. assuming you are using the HP version of altiris.


Hope this helps

[Goldyfarbs]

Fluid..

Well, we are using the Altiris Branded Image and I looked at using that same file, pl-xml file but we still have not had any luck.

We are a scripted installation shop, and also, I am having a hard time finding documentation on the OS = Name feature of Conrep.