Tech for the Enterprise

I’ve been beating my head against the wall on this one for 2 days now. In case any of you have this same issue I will document what I did.

I was setting up to image about 30 HP6735B machines and after I would image one I kept getting an Invalid LBAI when I rebooted. Normally I would simply run gdisk32 /mbr and that would fix it. Now I did not set up the master machine as this was from a customer but as I investigated I finally figured out they had changed the BIOS setting for the Disk. The reason they did this is XP does not support the AMD SATA AHCI Controller unless you press F6 during install and add the AMD SATA AHCI Controller Driver. This is a pain to do because you need to have a floppy so it was easier for them to just change the BIOS.

Generally if you have this error you can just use gdisk or gdisk32 /mbr and that will fix it. Sometimes you will also have to use the switch /p that would be after the /mbr. Example: (gdisk32.exe 1 /mbr /p). The 1 stands for the disk number.

But in the HP 6735B it did not do it. So here is what I did to fix it.

First thing the configuration:
HP 6735B
Windows XP SP 3
Symantec GhostCast Server 11.5.0.2113

First thing you need to do is change the Bios.
See image below.
System Configuration / Device Configuration / SATA Device Mode.
Select IDE then Save, also click, File (on the left), Changes & Exit

Then you still need to run: gdisk32 1 /mbr /p

I also ran the ghostWalker to change the SID. This is really not needed if you are going to join these machines to a Domain but I do it anyway. What I did is create a BATCH file that I run after the ghosting is done. I called it walker.bat and here are the lines:

gdisk32.exe 1 /mbr /p
GhWalk32.exe /BV=1:1 /CN=”ELM-<RANDOM_HEX>” /SURE

BIOS Screen Shot