W510 Cloning woes -- Ghost Solution Suite 2.5, Windows 7 x64

Question

I am having some maddening issues deploying Ghost disk images to a new w510 I picked up. We have several T510 and W510 systems in our inventory that I've successfully taken from and deployed to images of XP 32-bit. I have a Windows 7 x64 image that was taken off of a W510 4319-2NU. That model type was unavailable for the most recent purchase so I ordered a W510 431964U, which is pretty much the same except the amount of RAM.
I never get an error when creating an image. I'm taking a full disk image so I'd imagine all partitions are being picked up.
Every single time I attempt to deploy the 7 x64 image to this machine I get a CRC error from Ghost. I've tried all levels of compression in taking the image, including none, and the problem persists. To be sure I've tried different NIC drivers I've tried the Ghost universal UNDI DOS-based boot disk, the Linux-based boot disk, and the WinPE based boot disk and all fail at some point.  I have the SATA mode in the W510's bios set to Compatibility mode. I've tried different ghostcast servers with the images stored on different drives or servers.
Next week I intend to try a disk-to-disk clone via a eSATA hard drive dock. I tried direct cloning to a USB-attached spare drive but it (Ghost) could never find the external drive.
I'm beginning to wonder if there's a RAM or other problem with the brand new W510, yet in my testing I *was* able to deploy an XP 32-bit image to it. So now I'm questioning whether or not the problem is starting at the time that I create the image (since that succesful XP image was created on a different system). But as I reported above, when I take 7 x64 images from this machine ghost reports no errors.
Any thoughts? Am I missing something simple but obvious?

Answer 1

Camarones, I'll throw out several ideas, and perhaps some will be helpful.
First, presumably you ran Ghost's verify function on the Win7 64 image that you created.
One problem you're going to run into is that the size of the sleep file used to store the memory contents when you put the machine to sleep will be wrong. However, this should be similar to what you'd run into when you upgrade RAM.
Another problem is that Windows Vista and Windows 7 use a different anti-piracy mechanism than XP. Apparently, Vista & 7 compute some kind of key during installation, which is based on the hardware configuration of the machine. That key is likely then stored in the master boot record. So if you change various undocumented aspects of the hardware, the OS install will no longer be valid. As far as I know, Ghost does not know how to deal with that. You should be able to repair that problem using an authentic Win7 installation disc from Microsoft, except Lenovo doesn't provide this.
Also, you need a newer version of Ghost than you did with XP. I'm not familiar with the current state of Ghost. Make sure that whatever version you're currently using explicitly supports Win7. Acronis True Image is another option, and probably costs less than the time you've spent so far trying to get Ghost to work.
Also, the BIOS of the W510 contains a certificate that authenticates the copy of Windows that shipped on the machine. And this certificate varies from one production unit from the assembly line to the next unit. We know this, because Lenovo accidentally released a W510 BIOS update last year that corrupted that certificate, causing Windows to become unauthorized. The only solutions were to a) live with having to beg Microsoft for reauthorization each time you did things like change the hardware or update the BIOS, b) replace the motherboard, or c) install a new full retail copy of Windows.
Also, because you're transfering a full disk image, the file contains each byte of data of each sector of the hard drive, whether a file was stored in that byte or not. Ghost is expecting to install that image onto precisely the same hard drive. That's often going to be a problem if you try to install it on a non-identical hard drive, due to different drive geometry, etc. Also, that Ghost image will include the drive's master boot record, which may or may not be correct for the new machine. You might have better luck using an image of just the occupied portions of the hard drive (which probably won't include the swap file or the sleep file).
Finally, it may be that trying to clone a pre-installed copy of Windows 7 from one machine to another will be problematic since, like I said, Win7 has a different anti-piracy scheme than XP. Plus a pre-installed copy of Win7 may not be designed to be clonable to a new machine, for some of the above reasons. Of course, you need to pay for authorized copies of Windows 7 for the machines you're running it on. You might have better luck with a copy from Microsoft that's designed to be deployed to multiple machines.
So the problem you're seeing right now with the CRC error from Ghost may be related to one or more of the above. It may also be only the beginning of your problems.
You could also try just swapping the hard drive from one machine to the other, and see what happens (back it up first, of course). This should give you a quick idea of all the problems you're likely to run into.
Good luck!