I just got in a group of New HP Z840 workstations at my organization and wanted to use WDS as usual to deploy our image to them. These machines have the LSI 2308 SAS storage controller on the MB. I put the storage and NIC driver in the boot image
and all was working, or so we thought. Well on the first try the machine would image, the second try it would image, 3rd try it would throw an error "Windows could not create a partition on disk 0. The error occurred while
applying the unattend answer file's <Diskconfiguration> setting..." My answer file sets the disk to 90GB and my image is only 70gb.
The baffling part about it is that it only works sometimes. I have 96 of these machines and when we discovered this issue we took 32 out boxes set them up in a lab and started a base win7 image on them. 13 imaged the first time without issue.
So we re-did the test and 27 imaged the second time, with 2 of the original ones failing to image with the error above. Repeated the test again and could only get 19 to image...etc.We did this 9 times with no consistency to speak of. We changed
switches, we changed switch configuration, etc.
The WDS server is a windows 2008R2 server that is fully patched. We use this server for all our machines. All of our Z800 and Z820 class machines image without issue, but these new machines do not. I downloaded the driver recommended by
HP for these machines. We did another test where we took out the client unattend file so we would have to answer some questions before starting the image, it asked us to log in, we did..it asked us to choose an image, we did but, when it came down to choosing
the drive configuration, on some machines we had the hard drive listed on others we didn't until we put in a thumb drive and said go find the drivers. Not sure why the Z840's are behaving this way, but I have 90+ to image and this wrinkle is
not helping my situation at all. Any help provided would be greatly appreciated.
