Strangest BSOD i've seen in years. (x00000021a)

The last month ive been working on an image to deploy to machines our company resales.

All of the machines are identical. I've had zero problems on the two machines that i've been testing the image on. This past week though is the first week where we are actually loading them on machines that will be given to customers. Basically this is what has been happening:

1. Pull new computer out of box.
2. Image.
3. Do the OOBE.
4. Plug in network cable & connect to internet.
5. Input the windows license key.
6. Activate.
7. Install Novembers important updates (15 in total).
8. Reboot

Then i get this every time like clockwork:

STOP: x0000021a {Fatal System Error}
KnownDLL failed
status of 0x00000428 ( xxxxxxxx xxxxxxxx)


Now this is when things get strange. On each machine (6 so far), if i re-image a second time and follow the EXACT same steps i get no blue screen.

Side note: I have the image setup to give me a dump file. No file is ever created when they BSOD. So i have nothing to really analyze regarding that.


The only thing that seems logical (ive tried so many different things to narrow things down) is that some piece of hardware is being triggered on the few steps above that is causing the BSOD. Then, once its already been triggered it no longer interfers if i re-image a second/third/fourth time.


I've been dealing with blue screens and analyzing dump files since XP came out. I've never seen anything like this before. Any thoughts or ideas? If i can get my hands on another unopened computer i was going to try and reboot after activation and then update and reboot... to see if a BSOD happens.

All 6 machines are unbootable after they blue screen.

All BIOS dates are the same on all 6 machines.

This is happening on 6 machines so i don't see the logic behind memtest.

They are all the same. The serial numbers on the sticker for each machine are literally sequential (0063,0064,0065...).

If i can get my hands on another machine that hasn't been touched (since the issue only happens one time) im going to try and reboot between windows OOBE & activation before running windows update. My hunch based off the error code is that something is happening among those steps.

I made some progress. Using F8 i chose the boot option regarding digital signatures. This was on a computer that was blue screening that I put to the side.

I went to event viewer and found CodeIntegrity warning relating to:

Microsoft-Windows-Foundation-Package~31bf3856ad364e35~amd64~~6.1.7601.17514.cat
oem27.CAT catalog

and these driver files:

ks.sys
tdx.sys
tdi.sys
ndproxy.sys
netbt.sys
pacer.sys
wanarp.sys
rdbss.sys
dfsc.sys
tunnel.sys
userenv.dll
rasl2tp.sys
ndiswan.sys
raspptp.sys

These all appear to be windows specific.

The strange thing is if i check a computer that i imaged a second time (no blue screen but same image) these errors don't show.