Build Dell E Series Laptops

Soupy · 10-10-2008, 06:08 AM

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,

JenH · 10-10-2008, 11:48 AM

What version of DS? What OS version? XP SP2, XP SP3?

This was experienced with the the D series as well and there was a hotfix for XP SP2. XP SP3 already includes it.

My SP2 image worked because I had the hotfix in the image, but I've rebuilt with SP3 and it, too, works as expected.

Here is the article:

Windows XP Setup program may stop responding during video driver installation

Hope it helps.

Jen

JenH · 10-10-2008, 11:56 AM

Oh, sorry...missed the part about SP3 (no coffee yet -

), so you shouldn't have that issue.

What platform did you build the image on? How much is installed on the image? Can you provide your sysprep file? Please remember to remove or change your info on the sysprep so it's generic (i.e. the Product Key, admin password, etc.) Also provide your driver injection script. Perhaps there's something there causing the freeze up.

My image was built on an Optiplex GX260. It works on E4300, E6400, and E6500 as well as all of our other platforms. The image is only the OS, Office, and about 3 apps that are used globally. The rest is installed after the image is applied so the latest version of whatever standard application is always there.

Thanks,

Jen

Soupy · 10-10-2008, 12:29 PM

DS 6.9
Built on a Dell GX270
XP SP3 (as you noticed

)

I think we've got a fix in place for it now, i'm testing it at the moment on both models. If it doesnt work I will post the additional details you've requested.

If it does work i'll post how I fixed it

Thanks for your help so far.

Soupy · 10-10-2008, 12:39 PM

We have in fact fixed it

We make use of the HII tools in DS 6.9 for PNP and NonPNP drivers. I created an APPSet for this driver and injected the installation files + a script into the image during automation.

After the sysprep has completed and booted into windows, I call the script that silently installs the drivers using the vendors supplied .exe file.

Not ideal for something that should be a PNP driver, but I'm happy enough with it.

Overall though I think it's a poorly written driver from Intel, the hanging occurred with the version supplied from Dell and a more recent version from Intel. Not impressed.

Anyway, it's working now - good way to finish my Friday

JenH · 10-10-2008, 02:57 PM

Good to hear! Happy Friday indeed! :-)

rlgura · 11-04-2008, 02:46 PM

We've had alot of problems with these E-series too - came down to manually extracting the drivers for the Broadcom USH device, then editing the inf file (pnp spec was not matching what was in my machines).

I've found a couple posts about the locking up being caused by the battery - either remove the battery during build or rename battery.inf so that mini setup does not install the driver.

Problem I'm having now is with the video driver - Intel GM45/GE45/GS45 driver from Dell. When plug-n-play installs the driver, the screen goes crazy (unreadable) until mini-setup finishes and reboots.

Any suggestions?

rlgura · 11-04-2008, 03:17 PM

btw - I'm using this version of the video driver:

R197163.exe
Intel-GM45-GE45-GS45-Integrated-Graphics
6.14.10.4977-A05

Soupy · 11-05-2008, 05:02 AM

I had problems with the Intel Video driver to, (see previous posts) I resolved mine by not installing the driver at the PNP detection/installation stage and running the setup.exe with silent switches as a post installation task.

JohnF · 11-18-2008, 09:14 AM

This worked for us on our E6400's and E6500's when we were having the same problem. It lets you put the SATA and NIC drivers into the deployanywhere database. which seemed to be causing this problem for us. It uses ghost for the image which has now been incoorporated into DS.

Keslaa · 11-20-2008, 03:28 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by rlgura

We've had alot of problems with these E-series too - came down to manually extracting the drivers for the Broadcom USH device, then editing the inf file (pnp spec was not matching what was in my machines).

I am having trouble with the USH device as well. Can you tell me what you did to fix this? Currently, the entry in the Device Manager with the exclamation mark is labelled '5880' and has a device ID showing as 'USB\VID_05AC&PID_5800\0123456789ABCD'. This does not match the .INF file.

JenH · 11-20-2008, 03:42 AM

Dell has a firmware update that might fix this issue:

Drivers and Downloads

Keslaa · 11-20-2008, 04:04 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by JenH

Dell has a firmware update that might fix this issue:

Drivers and Downloads

I tried that as well, but no luck. Note that this machine does not have a fingerprint reader attached/installed at all.

JenH · 11-20-2008, 04:10 AM

What about the Control Point Security Manager Driver package? Is that being installed? It should install all the necessary security-related drivers.

Keslaa · 11-20-2008, 04:13 AM

That's what I thought, too. No go. I've installed everything on the Resource CD. That's why I'm curious as to what specifically rlgura did to the .INF file to get the driver working.

JenH · 11-20-2008, 04:16 AM

The Resource CD is very likely outdated. Dell just released new versions of the ControlPoint software this week. Though I'm a bit miffed about it because their release notes are extremely vague. Some say Initial Release, but I know that isn't true. A07 is not an initial release...lol.

Keslaa · 11-20-2008, 09:26 AM

I have installed all of the ControlPoint applications from Dell and I am still getting the same error. Any ideas?

Keslaa · 11-21-2008, 08:10 AM

Thanks to rlgura, I got the fix. The change in the .INF file is to add the line

%USB\VID_0A5C&PID_5800.DeviceDesc%=cvusbdrv.Dev, USB\VID_0A5C&PID_5800

under the Device Section. After that, no more hardware bangs!

UPDATE: In using the changed .INF file, I am able to step through the New Hardware Wizard without a problem. However, when used within our HII, the device is not enumerated in the Device Manager. I can step through the wizard, but the point is to NOT have to do that.

As a side note, on a couple of the devices (IDT High Def Audio and Intel Integrated Video) the Found New Hardware wizard pops up until after the app for the hardware is installed. The drivers are exactly the same but for some reason they are not registered until later. Any ideas on that front?

JimChud · 12-23-2008, 08:02 AM

I too am having problems with the E Series laptops,
We recently bought a E4300 to use to develope our build profile with and i just cant get it to build. I've now started building the machine Via WinPE instead of DOS as i usually use but once it gets to the point where it is just about to go in to the sysprep after dropping the drivers on to the machine and deploying the edited sysprep file it just BSOD and reboots. The BSOD is so fast that i cant see what driver or device is causing it to fail.

It would make sense that it is the storage device as its the first thing that would boot but i tried putting the devices in to the windows\inf directory to try and remove that issue with no avail.

i'm fairly new to altiris but between here and juice i've been able to build an image that works on 4 or 5 of our other machines without problems and this is my first major stumbling block.

can someone please advise where i should go with this?
Thanks
Jim

JimChud · 12-23-2008, 08:51 AM

i have found another post which i overlooked before posting

i will look through this to hopefully progress further

Keslaa · 12-25-2008, 02:11 AM

The fix I came up with isn't all that pretty, but it works. I actually ended up building a new image specifically for the E-series for a couple of reasons. The first is that the SATA operation doesn't lend itself very well to HII...at least the HII I have set up here. With the OptiPlex 755, I was at least able to script in a modification to the BIOS that would change the SATA Operation to ATA mode for the image drop. After a registry hack scripted in post-image deployment, I would then script in the BIOS change to flip SATA Operation back to AHCI. This was to take advantage of the SATA drive. No such luck in the E-series when it comes to the change in SATA mode.
Since I was going to have to build a new image, I went ahead and installed the drivers for the fingerprint reader. This fixed the original issue I was having.

Now, when I deploy the image, I use one set of jobs. The job that actually deploys the image checks the machine to see what the model is and based on the result, one of two .IMG files is dropped.