Winclone 4.1 and Casper Imaging 8.71 issue

[cosmosb]

Good people,

I work at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC). We have been using Casper since the spring. Right now we are working on the fall semester's Casper workflow strategies. One issue we can not seem to shake is with Macs running bootcamp installed by Casper Imaging.

We are currently using JSS v8.71 with Casper Suite 8.71 and Winclone 4.1. When using a Casper workflow configuration in Casper Imaging we get some peculiar behavior. If the Mac HD has never had a BootCamp partition added, the workflow resizes and partitions the drive into Macintosh HD and BootCamp, respectively. It then installs OS X and the Winclone image on those respective partitions. After reboot the Mac OS boots fine but the Windows OS will not boot. It either gives us a blinking cursor or " A disk error occurred please press ctrl alt delete"

What's even more peculiar, if we run that same workflow again on the same machine, everything works. Mac OS and Windows OS work fine. So it seems that something is happening when the Mac HD is resized and the BOOTCAMP partition is created and then the Winclone bundle is installed.

Has anyone else had any issues with this? Any insight is greatly appreciated!

thanks,
Cosmos

[franton]

Try getting an official Windows install DVD, booting it, getting to a windows command prompt and trying the following commands:

Bootrec.exe /FixMbr
Bootrec.exe /FixBoot
Bootrec.exe /RebuildBcd

I suspect the last command does the most work here.

[cosmosb]

Thanks Franton! Are you saying this is a resolution for the whole process? If we do that then what would be the next step you recommend? As mentioned if the BOOTCAMP partition already exists then windows boots without issue.

[franton]

No, this is merely a test to see if something is broken. The commands basically fix the master boot record, the boot sector (I think) and the boot configuration data.

I'm fairly certain it's the last one that's causing the difficulties. However you need to confirm one by one to see where the problem is for you, assuming it's one of those.

If it's the BCD, i'm curious if you allowed Winclone to replace the existing one from the computer you made the image from or not.

[cosmosb]

Thanks Franton! Will try now and update you in the morning. Cheers!

[cosmosb]

Franton, this did not work. We ran those commands and they all worked as reported but it did not boot the Windows OS.

We did allow Winclone to replace the existing BCD.

Any other thoughts?

[franton]

I'm sorry mate, but i'm out of ideas. Those commands are on an apple discussions page about the same thing and a lot of people claim it works for them.

[rscheil]

Are you creating a Boot Camp installer package with Winclone 4.1? If so, is the package configured to create the Boot Camp partition? We've seen issues where partitioning is configured in Casper as well as the Winclone package, which can cause issues. If Winclone finds a Boot Camp partition already created, it will not attempt to overwrite it, so that may be related to the install working on a second pass. Check in the target's /var/log/install.log for details about what's going on. We will monitor the thread but feel free to also send a support request to support@twocanoes.com.

Russell Scheil
twocanoes.com

[cosmosb]

Franton,

thanks again for all the help. We resolved it. We were using the ESD installer and instead build .dmg's from that ESD and made a Macintosh HD and Recovery HD, respectively. From there we were able to get things working with a stand configuration using:
Macintosh HD
Winclone
Recovery HD (used the hide script)

thanks,
cosmos