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I had 88 pieces of HP 840 G2 laptops. On one of them I installed Windows 7 with updates and drivers and cloned whole hard drive (all sectors) to the rest of the laptops. According to this topic - if it's the same model, it's safe: Can my laptop's Hard Disk be cloned and loaded to another laptop? Now some users have problem with blue screens. I know they are associated with wireless network card. There also was no Microsoft Virtual WiFi Miniport Adapter detected. I uninstalled the driver and installed it again and it helped, blue screens disappeared and two Microsoft Virtual WiFi Miniport Adapter items appeared in Device Manager. If it's safe to clone HDD, why do I have problems with it?

Now, I clone HDD differently. I use Sysprep with "Generalize" option to clone OS with updates and I add drivers to WIM image using DISM. I didn't see any blue screens yet, but again OS didn't detect any Microsoft Virtual WiFi Miniport Adapter, so I'm starting to worry that it's the same situation. Also there's C:\Windows\Temp folder taking whole free space after some time. I had the same problem when I was cloning HDD without Sysprep and DISM.

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alcohol is evil
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2 Answers2

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Even though they are the same model, the manufacturer can still use different wireless network cards in a laptop. This is based on availability and cost at the time of building. Check out the HP Drivers Download section for that model here:

Drivers & Software for HP EliteBook 840 G2 Notebook PC

There are two separate Intel driver sets and one Realtek driver set. What you would more than likely need to do is include all three of these drivers in your original image that you're cloning so that no matter what iteration of WiFi card the HP Elitebook has, it'll get picked up.

Mike Papadopoulos
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  • Network card is the same model, I checked it. When I install this driver normally, there's no problem at all. There must be a problem with adding driver with DISM. I think I do it correctly: unpack driver, delete all 32-bit folders and add drivers with recurse and forceunsigned options. – alcohol is evil Oct 14 '16 at 15:58
  • That's the process, yeah! Strange that it's giving you issues, and only on some machines. A workaround to that would be to include the install in your image and specify a command in Sysprep that runs the install of the driver package after the OS configuration completes, which would automate the process for you and keep you from having to install it manually. – Mike Papadopoulos Oct 14 '16 at 16:48
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When I install drivers in audit mode using driver installers, without using DISM or WAIK, and then I sysprep the same way as usual (oobe and generalize), but with answer file containing PersistAllDeviceInstalls option, it works perfect.

The only disadvantage I've noticed is that when I deploy image to different PC with device which device ID is different, but is also contained in the same INF file which was used to install driver, it doesn't recognize it, but it's not a problem at all, because I can prepare different image for each model.

I can prevent C:\Windows\Temp taking whole free space by emptying C:\Windows\Temp and C:\Windows\Logs\CBS contents before sysprepping. After that OS is removing those files regularly.

alcohol is evil
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