Status: 0xc00000e9 An unexpected I/O error has occured

Here is an unusual error we experienced recently. We were rebuilding an HP Blade server remotely using the iLO. But Windows setup was failing part way through.

We were rebuilding an HP Blade server with Windows 2008 64-bit. It should be simple enough. You need to have an ISO of SmartStart and of Windows. Then, using the Virtual Media feature of Advanced iLO, you attach the SmartStart ISO and run through the setup dialogue. Then on request attach the Windows ISO. Windows setup begins,using the parameters you entered in the SmartStart routine.

But we found this error every time:

Unattend-Error

"The Installation was cancelled". "Windows could not apply unattend settings during pass (null)"

Normally with a Sysprep error you have a part finished machine and you can extract the sysprep log files to see what the problem is. But in this case, being managed by SmartStart, the only option was to abandon the setup.

So we tried leaving SmartStart out and running the plain Windows setup. This time we got a different error. Windows setup would start copying the installation files, and then somewhere in the middle give this error:

IO-Error

So the first impression is that there is something wrong with the Windows ISO. But we tried different versions of Windows with the same results, so that seemed unlikely.

A search for the Status message shed no light on it except confirming that it is a problem with reading the media, but we already guessed that.

Eventually we had an idea. We copied the ISO from a VM SAN drive where it was sitting to a physical drive on a PC, and attached the iLO to that.

Success.

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