Again this thread has been so, so, so useful to me, but I have encountered a new annoyance that has escalated into a major problem.
Has anyone ever run into the Windows XP stop error 50, "PAGE_FAULT_IN_NON_PAGED_AREA" when using a "driver-packs-powered-windows-xp-image"?? The affected machines almost always recover after a reboot and maybe some driver tweaking, but it has still become a major issue for me.
In my setup the universal image is great for getting a machine to boot in Windows XP. This way the newly imaged machine(s) have all of my software and settings, I have a workable system, and I can tweak the drivers after initial boot if need be, then re-upload the image to a "machine specific image". The stop error 50 shows up quite often on many different types of machines but usually it is during the initial imaging process and it never returns after a reboot or two. If it does return I tweak the drivers by installing the factory chipset, LAN, and graphics drivers and I install the latest version of "Intel Matrix/Rapid Storage Manager".
But the real curse of this error is when I deploy the universal image to a single machine of a given type (often a GX260) and then I tweak the image a bit and re-upload it to a machine specific image, (removing the need for the extra driver packs installer which costs time and HDD space). Then finally after a mass image deploy to say a lab of matching machines I deploy a program called "Deep Freeze" (which freezes the machine and makes all changes impossible and therefore makes the image very clean and very robust because it can't be changed in any way) I get the blue screen on boot with Windows stop 50 and the page error. So essentially the machines are frozen in "blue screen boot".
I do not need to go down the path of troubleshooting hardware because this happens very often across many different types of machines with new and old hardware so I am SURE that it is some problem with my universal image. And I am also confident that it is not Deep Freeze that is causing the problem because my old images made from factory installs/drivers work just fine. It is just that some machine-specific images built from my general universal image suffer from this problem. Newer Optiplex 745/755 and 520/620 do not suffer from this, but I have seen the exact same problem on GX260, GX270, GX280, HP 6000, HP7600, and HP7700.
Lastly, there is A TON of misinformation out there about stop 50, and 95% of it does not apply to my situation, so I thought that I would ask here.
Thanks again for any/all advice, this thread has been so great!!
P.S. - I know that there has been a lot talk about virtual images and I am coming along in that world, but I have had less success than building them on actual hardware (which has tried/true/proven results) and also time is an important factor for me. When I have the time, I hope to get everything running with virtual images, but for now I have to make do with what I have built up to this point and I have to get our labs operational VERY soon, no matter what method I use... and of course it would be painful to go back to some old, non-universal/non-sysprep/non-driver packs, machine specific image (which would be missing all of my new software/updates/settings) because it would be so much work to get it up to date, and I would have to do it for EVERY machine-specific image, which would be a HUGE task, and in some ways would defeat the purpose of universal/sysprepped images.
Thanks!!
