imaging issue Issue imaging new HP 800G5 AiO, and HP 840G6 Laptops

[AlexB]

I am having issues imaging newly acquired PCs in our office. The EliteOne 800G5 AiO, and the HP EliteBook 840 G6 Laptop. When deploying an image using WDS, the image seems to install without an issue, but when the PCs reboot to prepare for the sysprep/first boot phase, I receive an error on both the AiO, and Laptop. (see album link for pictures of screens and descriptions).

It seems the laptop downloads a base image from HP using the HP Sure Recover feature in the BIOS, but the AiO does not. After disabling the HP Sure Recovery feature in BIOS on both the AiO and laptop, imaging works fine.

I tested the same image and answer file on a HP EliteOne 800G4 (with HP Sure Recover enabled by default in BIOS) without any issues or errors.

Has anyone else had issues imaging these model PCs without disabling HP Sure Recover? I cannot go into the BIOS for each individual PC to disable this as we move a lot of PCs through our lab. Any support on this will be greatly appreciated.

 

Album for all screenshots and descriptions for each: https://imgur.com/a/rIpGeFF

[SmartDeploySupport]

Turns out HP's Sure Recovery feature is looking for a valid Windows Recovery Environment.  Not sure why, and not having it doesn't mean that the OS can't be found... as demonstrated by the fact you can press Esc and the OS will boot just fine.

In this case the image had been captured with the "for use with WDS" option checked.  This leaves off the system partition (where WinRE is by default) and only captures the boot partition since WDS only supports importing images with a single index.

Note:  You only need to import an image into WDS if you are going to use it for multicast.

To work around the issue, you can either create a single partition VM and install Windows to that single partition.  Or you can place a regularly captured image next to the image that was imported into WDS and the Deploy Wizard will look for and use WinRE out of that image.

In a future release, we will look at making the Capture Wizard "for use with WDS" option handle this better by moving the Windows Recovery Environment from the system partition to the boot partition during capture.

[AlexB]

Thank you for the response. I have been working closely with Allen on your team with testing and discovery on this issue, and your post sums up exactly what we found.

Thank you for the support.

[JayM]

I had this issue too, what I did is, I switched the “Sure Start Security Event Policy” to “Log Event Only” in BIOS Sure Start under the Security tab. It was defaulted to Log event and notify user. This will stop prompting you about a Firmware change... blablabla. 

[SmartDeploySupport]

Sure Start is a different thing.  Sure Recover, if you wanted to disable it is under Advanced, "HP Sure Recover".

But, you shouldn't need to disable it.  Ensure your machine is in the factory default configuration of "Legacy Support Disable and Secure Boot Enable".

 

 

[AlexB]

37 minutes ago, JayM said:

I had this issue too, what I did is, I switched the “Sure Start Security Event Policy” to “Log Event Only” in BIOS Sure Start under the Security tab. It was defaulted to Log event and notify user. This will stop prompting you about a Firmware change... blablabla. 

JayM,

The purpose of this post was to find a solution so I would not have to go into the BIOS for each PC. The issue here is with HP Sure Recover, not Sure Start. However I cannot confirm if making that change to Sure Start would fix the issue I had, as Smart Deploy and I did not change that setting during testing in my support ticket to them.

The temporary fix for my issue without recreating all my VMs was manually deleting the "Storage" folder under "Windows PE" in this specific platform pack (See attached). However, I am still unclear how deleting this folder made the difference needed for a successful deployment using WDS.

As Smart Deploy stated above, It appears the issue is with how HP (on these particular model PCs) handles the OS with the WinRE during boot. The BIOS kicks in HP Sure Recover to download a new image when it cannot find the WinRE. As smart deploy said, a future release of Smart Deploy will handle the WDS image capture process better to move the WinRE so the PC BIOS doesn't trigger Sure Recover.

Hope this clears that up.