Monday, June 6, 2011

Dell Latitude E Series: 1st, 2nd, and 3rd Generations

I have decided to start this blog as a way for me to keep track of my notes and help out the IT community who face the same problems as I do. I am mainly talking about Dell Latitude E series family laptops with Window 7 64 bit and the use of Sysprep.
I am currently working on a E6410, E6420, and an Optiplex 745/755.
I need to start off by saying the E series 1st, 2nd, and 3rd generations do NOT have the same chipset, therefore they are not compatible and you will need to create 3 different images for deployment. Since the 3rd gen has the 2nd generation Core i5/i7 processors I am hoping the 4th generation will have the same chipset.
E6x20:
For those of you who have been forced to implement the E6x20 due to Dell discontinuing the E6x10 and are having Sysprep fatal errors I have two important issues you may want to consider looking at.
The first one is "Windows Media Player Network Sharing Service" in Services, for some reason Sysprep was failing due to this service, disable it! In your Sysprep log you will see that it failed while trying to execute "drmv2clt.dll" during sysprep cleanup. This dll belongs to Digital Rights Management, but I don't know whom to blame.
The next issue in Syspreping an E6x20 is the "Free Fall Sensor". The machine appears to have syspreped just fine until you un-mount it. When you do, you receive an "Error Handle" message. This message belongs to the Free Fall Sensor driver. While the "Error handle" message is open you can use Task Manager to show you the process it is running (FF_Protection), next use the Command Line column to show you the executable it is using. Once you follow the path and run the "FF_Protection.exe" you will see that the settings are set to "Temporarily Disable (until next reboot)", but when you reboot you keep receiving the same "Error handle" message. For some reason sysprep has removed the driver for the Free Fall Sensor (From Dell R294986), but it will still remain in the Drivers folder (C:\dell\drivers). I am not going to post the fix for it just yet because it is only a patch and you will not be able to use that image on any other E6x20 unless it has the Exact same hardware.
Concerning the E6410, I have been having issues with Sysprep failing due to the REARMS. I have rebuilt the image from scratch and I am going to proceed with sysprep soon. The same goes for an Optiplex 745, I will post my results when I have them.

4 comments:

  1. Thanks. Uninstalling the driver and re-installing it manually resolved the error which is what we'll have to do for the time being. Just got 10 Dell e5520 laptops in and they need to go out asap, so this helped. Thanks

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  2. This is happening on the M4600 laptops as well.

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  3. I've had the same problems.

    Freefall Sensor shows installed and working properly before sysprep.

    Afterwords sysprep runs the software appears to be installed but the driver is missing because you get the error on bootup and device manager shows it with the exclamation point.

    I have just removed the install from the image, and install it after the image is applied :(

    Let me know if you find a solution!

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  4. Precision M6600 also throws the same error after booting from syspreped image. Download and install R294986 to fix.

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