sysprep - then constant reboot

[Will Rickards]

Hi guys,

So my dads old computer is on the fritz.
I took the drive out of it, slaved it in a workbench machine (AMD X2 3800+) and cleaned the viruses out. Then I put it back in his machine (an old athlon 1800) and syspreped it. It shutdown. I put it in the workbench machine as the only drive. Started it. Windows crashes and it reboots.

Do I have a HAL problem? from single to multiprocessor or does sysprep take care of that? Do I have a driver issue regarding the chipset? Maybe it is as simple as the boot.ini needs to be edited?

I'm this close to giving up and doing a windows repair install. But I'm trying real hard to keep all his setting and stuff.

 

[Will Rickards]

Now I tried a slipstreamed XP HOme SP3 repair install (at the second prompt).
It does the setup thing and gets to detecting devices and then just reboots.
Another loop. This is even after I restored it from an image I took before the sysprep.

So do I have to boot it up in the old computer and add drivers or something?

More info for anyone reading.
Original computer is a Gigabyte GA-7DX Rev 4.3 with an AMD athon 1800 (I think). The hard drive was partitioned into a C and D. C was the old win98 install and D was the XP install. The hard drive was running off a SIL680 based IDE adapter to get around the 120GB limitation. The hard drive is 160GB.

The new computer is a Gigabyte GA-k8N Ultra SLI with an AMD 3800+ in it.

 

[Will Rickards]

Well I tried a SP2 CD for a repair install and no go.
So I begin to think there is a problem with the windows install that is preventing sysprep and the repair install from working. So I reimage the drive with the backup, throw it in the old machine with a fan pointing at it on high. Did I mention his computer kept overheating, the CPU fan is not working and has what appear to be bulging caps? Anyway, I hooked up the drive in the old computer so I could diagnose in its native place. And I kept getting these STOP 8E errors. I googled and get a couple rootkit results. So I put rootkitrevealer on from sysinternals (hey merc, you might want to add that to your get rid of malware instruction page). It reveals UACd.sys. Some rootkit. So I boot into the recovery console and disable that service. I first had to remember to slipstream the SIL 680 drivers onto the windows CD so it would see the hard drive and thus get a working recover console. Anyway, once that was removed, NOD32 is removing the rest and spybot and malwarebytes are running. As long as the hardware doesn't crap out on me I should be able to try syspreping it again. Hope there are no more reboots after that.

Supposedly this machine had NOD32 on it. I put it there before. So I have no idea how they got this infection. Maybe it was outdated and they didn't tell me.

If it was anyone else's PC I would have just reinstalled windows and been done with it.

 

[ddrueding]

NOD32 is the best antivirus I know of, but it doesn't stop everything. If someone was using IE, all bets are off.

 

[Will Rickards]

After it was clean, sysprep didn't work I think.
I had to do a repair install.
Either way I got him the fixed PC.

Weird issue with the drive letter though.
The C drive is a win98 install and D was the XP install.
But XP must have been E in the old machine.

Because after the repair install, it became D and then it was looking for everything on E. I had to do registry search and replace for E:\ to D:\. Found some software on the net for that.

Now the machine runs and everything is there.
Had to reinstall office97 (it would run but kept asking for the install msi).
But it is kind of slow even though I disabled nearly every startup thing.
Not sure what the problem is there.

 

[Stereodude]

The problem is that you didn't format it.

 

[Mercutio]

Uh, it kind of sounds like you don't know entirely what you're doing with sysprep, but that's OK.

The constant reboots were from a low-level hardware mismatch between your source and target machine, either a HAL mismatch or more likely a disk controller driver (or operating mode, though I doubt the machine you're dealing with is capable of AHCI). Yes, a repair install will fix that up nicely. I've stopped maintaining multiple prepped images in favor of just doing repair installs. Normally Via-based systems are the only ones I need to do them on, since my base, vanilla system is an Intel 945 chipset.

My current prepared image (945 + intel graphics + every NIC and storage device driver known to man) loaded perfectly on my i7 machine (X58 + Intel NIC + ICH10 in RAID mode + Auzentech sound) and the only thing I had to load was newer Radeon drivers.

 

[Will Rickards]

Here I thought sysprep removed all hardware information from the machine and redetected it. Lesson learned I guess. I had figured this out after googling about the reboot problem. It was definitely a HAL difference, single to dual processor. Also the hard drive was on an adapter card in the old machine to get around a size limitation in the onboard chipset. So that would have caused a problem.

 

[Mercutio]

Sysprep removes all unique information about hardware save for the hardware needed to start Windows, which amounts to the hardware needed for the Windows installer (the graphical-mode part of the install) to start. That's basically the HAL and disk controller.