Thomas M. Turner's Tech Ramblings  

If you have a Dell OptiPlex GX270 and a SATA hard drive, you will likely have problems using ImageCenter 5.x (formerly a product of PowerQuest, but then acquired by Symantec). At the time I originally posted about this problem, in August 2004, I had wasted hours trying to figure out why I was unable to create an image for my then brand new Dell model to the file server. I had never had this problem with any other prior Dell model. This was the first model I had worked on that had shipped with a SATA hard drive, though, and the result was that ImageCenter (as part of DeployCenter) would always lock up, not long after I had launched it.

The solution I eventually found was to use the /IDE=OFF switch:
PQIMGCTR.EXE /IDE=OFF

At the time, Symantec had not yet posted this KB article about the problem I was having: "PQIDeploy or DeployCenter stops responding while loading, before the interface appears"

So, in my own desperate search for any possible answer, I eventually found my way to Intel's support site. I wondered if the problem could be related to the Intel LOM networking in the GX270 model. Although not specifically about ImageCenter, I did find a KB article about problems with Ghost and systems with Intel LOM networking. At that point, I wondered if there was a similar setting in ImageCenter to the -FNI setting in Ghost. A little bit of guesswork led me to try /IDE=OFF and sure enough I was back in business.

Of course, I had also contacted Symantec tech support via e-mail and the next day their reply was in fact to try the /IDE=OFF switch (and /NOCDR switch), whenever ImageCenter locked up, even though they had not yet posted a KB article with that information (and they didn't until February 2005).