Deploying captured Windows 11 golden image using FOG results in Windows only being able to boot into recovery

[lucamathuse]

Hardware/Environment:

Server: FOG Project v1.5.10 (Running on Ubuntu 22.04)

Target Hardware: 550x HP ProDesk 600 G6 SFF

Golden Image: Windows 11 Pro (fresh install)

Image Settings: Single Disk - Resizable, Partition Manager: Partclone Zstd

The Problem:

I am able to capture and deploy the image successfully (no errors during the PXE process), but upon reboot, the target machine immediately enters a Recovery loop with Error Code: 0xc000000f and File: \WINDOWS\system32\winload.efi.

Steps taken on Golden Image before capture:

Entered Audit Mode (Ctrl+Shift+F3) during OOBE.

Disabled WinRE:

reagentc /disable

Deleted the Recovery Partition via diskpart and extended to fill the disk (resulting in: EFI -> MSR -> C:).

Disabled Hibernation:

powercfg -h off

Verified BitLocker/Device Encryption is Fully Decrypted.

Made BCD agnostic:

bcdedit /set {bootmgr} device partition=\Device\HarddiskVolume1

bcdedit /set {default} device boot

bcdedit /set {default} osdevice boot

Ran Sysprep:

sysprep.exe /oobe /generalize /shutdown

My captured image directory looks like this:

total 5.9G
-rwxrwxr-x 1 fogproject fogproject    4 Apr  7 09:45 d1.fixed_size_partitions
-rwxrwxr-x 1 fogproject fogproject 1.0M Apr  7 09:45 d1.mbr
-rwxrwxr-x 1 fogproject fogproject  697 Apr  7 09:45 d1.minimum.partitions
-rwxrwxr-x 1 fogproject fogproject   20 Apr  7 09:45 d1.original.fstypes
-rwxrwxr-x 1 fogproject fogproject    0 Apr  7 09:45 d1.original.swapuuids
-rwxrwxr-x 1 fogproject fogproject  697 Apr  7 09:45 d1.partitions
-rwxrwxr-x 1 fogproject fogproject  697 Apr  7 09:45 d1.shrunken.partitions
-rwxrwxr-x 1 fogproject fogproject  15M Apr  7 09:45 d1p1.img
-rwxrwxr-x 1 fogproject fogproject  767 Apr  7 09:45 d1p2.img
-rwxrwxr-x 1 fogproject fogproject 5.9G Apr  7 09:54 d1p3.img.000

Observations:

• The target machine BIOS sees the disk as a generic “UEFI - WDC…” rather than “Windows Boot Manager” after deployment.

• Changing FOG Exit Type to rEFInd did not resolve the issue.

Has anyone encountered this specific behavior with Windows 11 on HP UEFI hardware? Or with FOG in general? I tried everything I could find but nothing is helping.

[mashina]

@lucamathuse Hi. I have faced similar situation on HP. I think your computers are going into recovery because the BIOS hasn’t updated its boot entries. So it still thinks it should load the old OS.

From the steps, I saw you fiddling with the Boot entries. I’m not familiar with that method, but at least on my computers, I don’t need to change anything. Just a sysprep -> Shutdown and capture.

Have you actually tried investigating whether the data has been copied to your disk? Do you see the boot directory? You should be able to drop into the CMD from that recovery or advanced option and investigate that.

I have deployed Windows 11 while the image type was Windows 10, and never needed to change anything.