Bad PBR signature or missing operating system error

Products

• Deployment Solution

Issue/Introduction

After performing a bare metal to OS job from within the Deployment Solution for Dell product, the computer reboots and I receive one of the following errors:

• Invalid PBR Signature 
• Missing Operating System

Cause

The problem is caused by diskpart not writing to the disk correctly when laying down the Dell Utility Partition.

Resolution

There are many solutions for this problem.

1) Use the Linux pre-boot environment for 32 bit Windows installations.  This error does not show up if the Linux environment is used.

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2) Do not install the Dell Utility Partition. 

  Remove the task in the OS installation job that installs the Utiility Partition.

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3) If the Utility Partition is needed and you cannot use the Linux preboot you may follow these steps to modify the existing jobs to run correctly:

Download and unzip the images found in the UP.zip attachment attached to this article, and place them in the following directory: "...\Deployment Server\Images\".

Now we need to modify the OS install scripts to use these images :

Open up create_util_winpe.bat (found at ...\Deployment Server\Dell\ascripts\WinPE) in a text editor and comment out (:: before the line) everything between

 "::

  :: Create Utility Partition

  ::"

and

  ":mount_lbl"

In their place (but before :mount_lbl) place the following line of code :

  %share%\RDeploy\Windows\rdeploy.exe -md -f %share%\Images\UP.img -sz1:64M -rescan

Now we will modify the create_windows_part_winpe.bat (also at ...\Deployment Server\Dell\ascripts\WinPE)

Again comment out each line between

 "::

  :: Create OS Partition

  ::"

and

  ":mount_lbl"

and in their place (again before ":mount_lbl") place the following line :

  %share%\RDeploy\Windows\rdeploy.exe -md -f %share%\Images\WBASE.img -sz2:4000M -rescan

The job should now run on this system, and any others, without problems.

Applies To
Deployment Solution 6.9
Deployment Solution for Dell 3.1