WDS XP Push Fails With Corrupt HAL.DLL

[JBradshaw]

I'm trying to push an XP image to a bunch of Dell GX520 desktops. It kept
bombing on reboot with an error:

Windows could not start because the following file is missing or currupt:
<system root>\system32\hal.dll.

I finally found the problem had to do with WDS trying to deploy to partition
1 of a hard disk, but Dell creats two patitions on their hard disk, one for
utilities, and the other for OS loads.

To work around this, I booted off a Windows Server 2003 CD and deleted all
the partitions, then PXE booted and downloaded the WDS image. It worked
perfectly.

Of course, booting up off a Windows Server CD and deleting the partitions is
not a good long term solution -- we do way to much imaging to have to go
through that. Is there a better (quicker) way to delete the partitions
before imaging the macines?

I have also read that a utility called imagex might let me modify the
boot.ini of my image, but I haven't been able to get that to work. imagex
never can seem to mount my image. Maybe I've got the syntax wrong. If
anyone has any good instructions on that, I will give that another try.

Thanks

[David Trimboli]

Post by JBradshaw
I'm trying to push an XP image to a bunch of Dell GX520 desktops. It
Windows could not start because the following file is missing or
currupt: <system root>\system32\hal.dll.
I finally found the problem had to do with WDS trying to deploy to
partition 1 of a hard disk, but Dell creats two patitions on their
hard disk, one for utilities, and the other for OS loads.
To work around this, I booted off a Windows Server 2003 CD and
deleted all the partitions, then PXE booted and downloaded the WDS
image. It worked perfectly.
Of course, booting up off a Windows Server CD and deleting the
partitions is not a good long term solution -- we do way to much
imaging to have to go through that. Is there a better (quicker) way
to delete the partitions before imaging the macines?

You can include a call to Diskpart in a script that runs with the
Windows PE image on your WDS server. See instructions here:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc766521.aspx

Before I started using Microsoft Deployment Toolkit 2008 to deploy my
images (much more customizable than WDS, but harder to learn to use) I
had exactly the same problem that you do. Calling a Diskpart script was
my solution.

You’ll need ImageX, which comes with the Windows Automated Installation
Kit. ImageX quickly became my favorite imaging tool of all time.