The Realm of the Verbal Processor

Iastore.sys – Status: 0xc0000359

I’m blogging this as much so that I can remind myself in the future what the heck this error means. I’ve come across it several times, and each time I forgot what the issue was and had to figure it out all over again.

So…there is the scenario…I was doing an OSD deployment in ConfigMgr this week…specifically a Vista x64 deployment. The system connected to PXE fine and downloaded the boot image, but when the boot image attempted to start, I got this lovely error message with two key phrases: 0xc0000359 and iastore.sys. (I think the exact message was something like “Windows failed to load because of a critical system driver is missing, or corrupt.”) I know I’ve seen this before, but what does it mean?

Long story short…iastore.sys is part of the Intel mass storage driver. Windows PE needs that mass storage driver to be in the boot image in order to see the hard drive. This is on a Dell system. I had imported the mass storage drivers into my boot images, but had mistakenly put the x86 version of iastore.sys into the x64 boot image.

Although…that leads to a different observation/gripe…Intel…why would you name the x86 and the x64 drivers the same thing? And one more gripe…these are Dell drivers that I have imported into ConfigMgr. If you look at Dell’s version.txt file that is part of the driver, it shows which OSes are applicable for the driver. When you import this driver into ConfigMgr, it imports as being applicable to basically everything (which it is not), and therefore causes problems later. Most of the time this isn’t an issue, but it definitely causes problems at times. The only way to fix it is to manually edit the “applicable to” settings for each driver. I haven’t taken the time to figure out if it is a problem with the way the INFs are created by Dell, or if it is a problem with the way that ConfigMgr parses the files.

All that said…the fix is pretty simple…import the correct driver into the boot image.

November 25, 2008 - Posted by Jarvis | ConfigMgr, Microsoft