0x0000007E BsOD After WDS Image on Dell Latitude E5430

I have been working on a single image WDS deployment for our company laptops for a few months as a sort of unsanctioned side project. I finally made a breakthrough a month ago and I got the image working for just about every model laptop we have, except for the Dell Latitude E5430. After applying the image the system would reboot to do the OOBE install. After showing the windows loading screen and before it would normally start the rest of the install, the system would BSoD and reboot.

I was unable to boot into any form safe mode and boot logging and debug mode were useless because the BSoD was occurring before either of those become useful. While booting into safe mode, the last line displayed was the disk driver. I was only able to see the blue screen info after choosing the Disable the Automatic Restart on System Failure in the advanced boot options. (BTW, kudos to Microsoft for not making it possible to set that as a permanent boot option in an offline state, really great idea guys :( ) I assumed this storage drivers were the cause and I already knew that some of our laptops require us to switch the SATA mode in the BIOS if we weer to swap hard drives between models. However, doing so did nothing to alleviate the BSoD.

I tried many things, but ultimately I resorted to disabling all hardware in the BIOS and this got the machine to boot up without a blue screen. The next step was to re-enable everything and then disable one thing at a time. Ultimately, disabling USB was what would allow the machine to boot. So it is apparently a USB driver issue. I booted into Win PE and use DISM to investigate the USB drivers. I didn't see anything unusual, but decided to remove all of the USB hub drivers. The system would then boot BSoD free without USB disabled, however, with no USB hub driver, USB didn't work. After installing the USB drivers from the E5430 driver cab, it worked fine, but to my surprise, it just reinstalled the same USB hub driver I had removed offline. What?

I take a look at the driver stores on the WDS server and, sure enough, it is the same driver file and version I had just installed. Obviously it would be since I imported the drivers to WDS from the exact same driver cab. I decided to take a look at the install image and see what drivers were installed in it. Turns out the install image contained a newer version of the same USB hub driver. I had used a Dell Latitude E5450 to create my base image, so the E5450 drivers are native to the install image. I removed all the USB hub drivers from the install image and set to re-imaging an E5430. This time around there was no blue screen on first boot. USB also worked properly after windows was finally up and running.

Though I don't see it documented anywhere, apparently the newer USB hub driver is not backwards compatible with the older firmware. And, for whatever reason, the OS was choosing the wrong USB hub driver at boot even though the correct one gets chosen during install due to the fact that the newer driver is in the install image.