Systems Management

Are you deploying to one model of hardware or different models? It is always a good idea to include as much detail as possible including hardware types.
Please bear in mind that the operating system you are installing is not made by Dell so driver settings are not just for Dell machines. If you also think back to the manual install process for Windows, the one thing that you are always asked for during the early stages of install is to provide block drivers (if required) to allow the operating system to access the hard disk subsystem. Therefore, errors reporting that windows could not be installed or configured on that hardware are generally due to a lack of the correct block drivers. Pretty much everything else can be handled with Windows native drivers or without loading drivers if they are not available - leading to the yellow exclamation marks in device manager. - EdT 8 years ago

I guess I am still confused. Should I be checking the 'use driver feed'? What do you mean by Block drivers? I have never seen requirement in a Windows installation to provide block drivers. - jfrasier 8 years ago

By all means try checking "use driver feed". Block drivers are drivers for any device that moves data in blocks, such as a hard disk. Microsoft refer to them as Mass Storage Drivers. Installation of Windows 7 and later tend to provide a more graphical interface, but if you think back to XP (for example) there is an initial boot to a DOS-like environment where you get a chance to choose drive partitions for installation, and are also asked if you want to install a driver at that point. This is a request for what I refer to as a block driver. In the old days, all PCs came with IDE drives which were natively supported by Windows and no additional drivers were required unless you had a high end server and were using SCSI hard disks. These days, machine come with SATA hard disks pretty much as standard, and these have been manufactured in SATA-l SATA-ll and SATA-lll interface speeds. At the same time, there have been many different SATA chipsets manufactured to handle these drives. Consequently, you need to provide these drivers during the initial installation of the operating system as otherwise, the installation programs will not be able to access the hard disk and installation will fail. These drivers are handled separately in sysprep.ini as they are loaded way before windows starts and the plug and play subsystem starts loading device drivers for peripheral equipment.
So if all your machines are the same model, or use the same SATA chipset then your operating system should at least boot. but if you have different hardware, your image needs to take account of these differences and provide the correct drivers. - EdT 8 years ago