Blue screen of death (BSOD) after imaging to Windows XP

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Like most businesses, we still have programs that rely on Windows XP to run. So, I built a Windows XP Professional image to push out to our slightly older machines where XP is needed to run these older programs.

Once created, the image on some machines was working fine, but on some (mostly newer older machines if that makes any sense!) on boot up we were getting the dreaded BSOD.

After tweaking the image and messing about with task sequence settings, it turned out the issue was actually BIOS related.

So, if you are running an image to put a machine to Windows XP, especially on Dell machines and you get the BSOD, you might want to check that your BIOS is set to IDE and not AHCI. You should find that if you change it to IDE, it’ll then boot without issue.