The only difference that I'm aware of between the early and later batch of 6520s is the AF drive. I use MDT 2010 with WinPE 3.1 and have confirmed the driver are being partitioned and aligned properly.

I understand Microsoft doesn't support XP on AF drives. I guess my question is am I wasting my time trying to get our XP image to work?

We're having the same issue. I did the same thing you did - sysprepped the 10.1.0.1008 drivers into our XP image and deployed the image through MDT 2010 and I'm getting the same 7B error. Not sure where to go from here, but you're not alone with this issue.

Does changing the SATA Operation in the BIOS have an effect? I'm trying to identify if the issue is with one of the 2 mass storage drivers (AHCI or RAID).

No. I've changed the BIOS setting to RAID, AHCI, and ATA. All result in a BSOD.

Also, I've tried using the latest Intel 10.6 storage drivers in the XP image but no change.

I found a workaround as well. You can use nLite (www.nliteos.com) to build an XP CD and slipstream the storage driver (and any other ones you want to load) onto the disk and build your image from scratch. You should then be able to capture it with MDT for future deployments. We haven't gotten that far yet, but I'll be sure to let you know if it works with MDT going this route.

Warren, I've just installed a non-AF drive in the 6520 and pulled our XP image down. It worked perfectly. This confirms that the issue is related to the AF drive.

PLEASE escalate to the HD Engineering team. Again we expect many Latitudes with AF drives in the coming month and these require XP. I have also seen several users in other forums with this exact issue. Please let me know if I need open a ticket with Gold Tech Support, I've already notified our TAM.

I don't know why that would be necessary. I've always been able to build, sysprep, and capture XP images within MDT 2010. This process has always worked perfectly.

This is an issue related to the AF drive. So I will wait for Dell's response.

Not sure why, but I can deploy our image on any other device - laptop or desktop - with MDT, except for the latest batch of E6520s we received. I sysprepped the 10.1.0.1008 driver into our existing image yesterday and tried to deploy it through MDT and it didn't work. But using the exact same driver the way I described above worked fine. We've deployed other E6520s before using MDT and the 9.6.0.1014 driver. Just throwing it out there... I suspect the issues are related.

Dell Tech support just informed me that ExtendOemPartition = 1 in sysprep.inf causes an issue with AF drives. I will remove it and try again. Will let you know.

http://kcs.dell.com/agent/agentIntegrationService?op=viewSolution&solutionId=419845&solutionVersion=

That worked. Removing ExtendOemPartition=1 from sysprep.inf did the trick.