Hi All,
I've got 2 new Dell Latitude E Series laptops in on a try buy from Dell to test and make sure we can build them on DS... slight problem, we cant
I've got a E6500 and a E5400 and both are displaying the same problems. They both boot into WinPE, I deploy my syspreped image into them and copy the drivers down to the image in automation. (Driver repository on the local disk, Device Path reg key telling the OS where to look for drivers) Inject the Hal, all works fine.
Laptop reboots into the syspreped image, starts to go through the usual steps, when we get to the installing devices stage the laptops freeze with the progress bar at exactly half way. At this point one of 2 things happens, it either hangs there and doesn't go any further, I've left it for over 2 hours in the vain hope it would go further but it doesn't. The other behaviour we get is that the screen will flicker as if it's installing the video driver but then change to a black screen with a blinking cursor up in the top left corner and not go any further. If I restart the laptops sometimes it goes through and completes other times it doesn't and will hang at the same point. But I don't get any errors reported which is making it that much harder to troubleshoot.
My initial thoughts were video driver issue so tried the build with no video drivers, but the same behaviour occurred. I then thought flaky hardware, but when our second try buy arrived and displayed the same issues, it seemed less likely.
The image I'm using is fairly new, I rebuilt our image about 2 weeks ago with SP3 installed and the latest windows updates installed and it works on all our other hardware platforms (about 15 in total, both Dell and HP) so I know the image is good.
With a lot of random rebooting I have got a “successful” builds out of it, but I feel that's more luck than anything else. Out of about 20 attempts at building these laptops I've had 1 what I'd call successful build but even that required 1 reboot when it froze up.
I've googled for similar issues, scanned this forum and others for solutions but so far come up with nothing, I'm open to any sensible suggestions at this point
Apologies for the length of post,
Thanks,
