Hello everybody,

In my organization we have been using fog for about 2 years now, with its ups and downs, on about 700 PCs. Recently we needed to image a group of 20 new Optiplex 3020s and we used a Windows 7 image, that had previously worked on other machines.

The image has been sysprepped and it contains some first-startup scripts, mainly for drivers and domain integration. It was not developed by me.

After the imaging process, the computers all failed to boot to windows, displaying the message:
“drmk v8.00 can’t load kernel file”

Looking that up I found out it’s an issue with the default dell partition, which works in a way similar to the windows System Reserved partition.

I have:

• Successfully downloaded and imaged another (somewhat older) Optiplex 3020 with this image
• Upgraded and downgraded the bios version on above said test machine, and it imaged correctly again
• Used G-Parted to remove that partition and do a clean image on one of the “broken” machines - still problematic.
• Ran dell diagnostics on an imaged computer - everything checks out
• Few more small fixes I can’t really remember

We have resorted to using just a bunch of HDDs and copying the image directly using 3rd party tools, but this is obviously not an ideal solution. So, the problematic situation has been solved (/avoided), but the original problem remains and I would like some ideas on the cause and what I may have done wrong.

Some additional information:

• The computers came prepackaged with an ubuntu 15.04 installation. I have seen mentions of others that after installing Ubuntu their problem came up.
• They contained a small dell partition (~150MB) and all the rest of the disk was a single partition.
• This is not the first time we have used such machines, nor is it the first time we have used this image.