"Windows could not finish configuring the system"-->SOLVED

If you just want the solution and not my drawn out explanation of what I was doing that triggered it, scroll down to the bottom :) For the rest of you:

I was extremely fortunate this summer to land a student position with the Canadian Food Inspection Agency. As an IT Support Analyst, I have performed a number of tasks and I’m learning a lot of practical tricks that you just don’t get the chance to run into as a student. It’s been awesome.

The reason for this post, however, is not to espouse the fact that I’m a lucky bastard and jobs are great.

One of the myriad tasks I am performing currently is imaging a crapload of laptops. The CFIA uses a Lite Touch method; wherein the boot sequence is started by a technician who has access to deployment servers on the domain. They then select the image from a share and let technology do the rest.

It’s pretty damn fast if you’re physically where the servers are; but the reason it works is because as long as you’re part of the domain, you can image your client’s laptops all day long; physical location doesn’t truly weigh into it, save for speeding up the process.

This week though, I ran into a really annoying problem.

First off, this fix is guaranteed to work on HP’s 650 G2s. It might work on other laptops but I can’t say for certain because I have yet to experience the problem on any other platform.

So, the problem. After selecting the necessary image, and letting the laptop chug away on its docking station, I came back to it to find an error message. The screen displayed “Setup is Starting Services” but a dialogue box over top states, “Windows could not finish configuring the system. To retry configuration, restart system.”

It was unexpected but I figured what the hey, restarting is easy enough.

This time I paid attention to my problem for the nonce and after seeing the screen say, “Windows is Updating RegKeys” I got the same error message.

I shook my head and restarted the imaging process; being located where the deployment servers are is truly a godsend.

A brief period of time later lo and behold same damn error.

Time to Google this little bastard. Which surprisingly, didn’t actually help. There are a crap tonne of posts and blogs on this error and I tried all of the top comments.

Zip, nada, nothin’ doin’.

I asked for help from the rest of the Analysts and they suggested a number of ideas, none of which worked either.

I spent hours hunched over the damn thing until in my frustration I turned it off by holding in the power button. Windows 7 didn’t like that so I got the option to Safe Boot, you know the menu, and I just clicked it for shits and grins.

Same error popped; I’d figured that’d be too damn easy a solution.

I went for a late lunch, but when I came back, the damn laptop was cheerily logging into the local administrator account and running the scripts it was supposed to. Five minutes later I had a perfectly imaged asset.

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