Tech Documentation Blog

Blogging is something that up till now never really caught my interest. I really don't read other people's blogs, so I guess I never thought of writting one. However, as I'm sitting here in the tech office at my school at 7pm on a Friday night after struggling with creating a ZenWorks image of the student tablet that actually works, it occurs to me that it would be good to document some of these experiences in case I find myself in the same postition.

ZenWorks imaging has never really worked as flawless as it appears in the product literature. We always have to come up with workarounds to get it to work. I currently think the problem might have to do with the service partition on the tablet. It was the second partition on the drive and zenworks imaging couldn't see it. Somehow it being there may have messed up the boot record so the tablet wouldn't boot. Usually if the boot record gets messed up we can boot from a Windows XP CD and run FixBoot and FixMbr to correct the problem, but when I try to boot these tablets with the WinXP SP2 CD I get the blue screen of death hardware error. I don't know if it has something to do with the tablet hardware, SP3 being on the tablet, or the partitions being out of wack. So I deleted the service partition, resized the C drive to take up the space that was filled up and am trying a multicast image to two tablets right now. I wish I could have preserved the service partiton, I don't think rescue and recovery will work without it, but at least I'll get my tablets imaged.