More imaging frustrations and success

No luck the tablets still wouldn't boot just that stupid blinking underscore. I tried booting the XP CD with the same results -- blue screen of death about hardware error. Went home frustrated at 8pm having spent 11 hours in the building.

Next day started googling ZenWorks Imaging and other associated phrases. Got on Lenovo forumn, they made mention of using the -IB switch on ghost if the imaged computers don't boot. Did more research trying to find out what the equivalent of the -IB switch is in ZenWorks Imaging. Found post that said there isn't -ib switch in Zenworks imaging, but it made reference to the zen partition which we don't have. I wonder if we set it up would it keep the boot partition from getting screwed up?

Then I remembered that the blue screen of death said something about a hard disk error or a problem with the hard disk drivers or possible virus. Then I remembered looking at an older bios that had some setting in the bios to block viruses at boot up or some similar nonsense. So I figured I'd go over to school to check the bios setting. When I got there I didn't find any reference to antivirus in the bios, but under security I did find something about memory protection so I disabled it and rebooted... Nope, same stupid blue screen! So I kept poking around in the bios, I saw a reference to the SATA drive, which I think is new to this particular thinkpad. The error said something about hard drives, so maybe this is it. It had two settings in the bios. It was set to something like AHCI or compatibility. I switched it to compatibility and rebooted from the Windows XP CD... Success! I was able to run the Repair with fixboot and fixmbr, I rebooted and the image successfully booted! I went back into the bios and changed the SATA setting back to AHCI. And I got this done in about an hour which makes me feel a little better about the hours I wasted. I wonder if a Windows XP SP3 CD would boot without having to change the setting to compatability? Now at least I know they can image the student tablets while I'm gone to Memphis at the Laptop institute.