disk hardware configuration

[jjjustinnn]

I'm new to this utility, and having some troubles. I finally got a CD with the offline image to boot and deploy, but as soon as it boots it comes to error:

"Windows could not start because of a disk hardware configuration problem.

Could not read from the selected boot disk. Check boot path and disk hardware.

Please check....."

Dell Optiplex 780 XP created with Microsoft Virtual PC. This is the same hardware used to create the image and it was created using Disk2Vhd, then resized (due to Virtual PC limitation on HDD size) to 127G using Vhd Resizer. The VM runs with no issues except I now see two OS at boot. One that says Disk2VHD Microsoft XP....

Thanks for any help,

-j.

[Erik]

Hi Justin,

The first thing that sticks out is the P2V process. We do not recommend starting with a physical machine. Can you try installing Windows XP to a virtual machine (you can use VPC, VMware Player/Workstation, Hyper-V, etc...), then capture an image from there. If it deploys fine we will know the problem was with the P2V.

Thanks,

Erik

[jjjustinnn]

I'll continue to work this issue, but this is a very disappointing reply. I purchased this product specifically to capture then manage existing legacy machines. I do not have the capability of rebuilding these images from scratch.

Can you expound more regarding this limitation? Or can you provide advice for this attempt?

thanks,

-j.

[Erik]

Hi Justin,

SmartDeploy was designed to be a hardware independent imaging solution. To ensure that an image created can go to any device, thus making it hardware independent, we made it a requirement to start with a virtual machine. The virtual machine requirement ensures that there is a very limited amount of hardware specific information in the image. When capturing from a physical machine you end up with all of the device drivers in your image, which can cause conflicts when going to another device. This is why it is so important to start with a fresh install to a virtual machine.

If you must capture from the physical machine you could try removing as much of the device information as possible and ensure there are no errors, or problems with the machine before capture. You could also try using VMware Converter rather than the Disk2VHD and resizer process.

Thanks,

Erik