WDS and Dell OEM Partition

  • Thread starter Thread starter houstonguy78
  • Start date Start date
H

houstonguy78

Hello,

After reading a few other threads on the Dell OEM partition and the hal.dll
error, I was wondering what I could do to image out of the box machines.

My scenario...

Received 98 Dell Latitude D530 laptops that need to get imaged ASAP. Loaded
one with a base image from scratch and editied the boot.ini file to only use
partition 1 (removed the last line in boot.ini) since when it would boot I
would get the message asking what OS to boot from :

Windows XP Professional
Windows XP Professional

Which I don't want...just want it to go straight to the logon window.

I finished the image and captured to the WDS server with no issues.

However, when I try to image any other out of box machine I get the message
that the system cannot boot because HAL.dll is missing or corrupt etc... I
know that this is because of the damn OEM Dell utility partition...which I DO
NOT WANT!

I want one single partition and don't want to have to edit the boot.ini on
the remaining 97 laptops manually to remove the line with partition 2. I
know how to fix this manually in winpe but the key here is automation...this
is a major pain considering we get about 600 pcs a year at my sites!

I know someone else out there has to have seen this issue and come up with
something!

Thank you in advance for ANY input.
 
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