Trouble rolling out Windows 10 Precision 3660

We bought 7 Precision 3660 workstations, all exactly the same. Core i9 processor, 32 GB RAM, Nvidia RTX 3080 video, 2x M.2 512 GB storage. Same BIOS settings / version. Windows 10 22H2.

We're a small company so I like to keep things simple. For rolling out multiple machines, I create one reference machine, create an image and install that image onto the other machines. This has been working pretty well in the past. But not with those Precision 3660 machines. Installing Windows and applications no problems. Even creating an image is smooth sailing, where in the past SysPrep would normally throw in a couple of wrenches. Not this time. With the reference machine Sysprepped, I PXE boot into Aomei Backupper, hook up a USB drive and let Aomei create a System Image. When it's finished, I hook up the USB drive to another of the 3660's, PXE boot that machine into Aomei Backup and restore the image to this new machine. When finished, reboot the machine and expect the OOBE.

Nope. Windows won't boot - There’s an invalid object in the boot configuration data store 0x0c0000024.  I plug in a USB stick with the Recovery Environment and restart the machine from that USB drive. First I try Startup Repair - which can't fix the problem. See 'C:\Windows\System32\Logfiles\Srt\SrtTrail.txt' for more information. But that file / path isn't there, so that's no help. Googling the aforementioned message shows many, many sites wich all suggest the same thing, like bootrec /fixboot (ok), bootrec /fixmbr (access denied) and bootrec /rebuildBCD (fails).

Now what. Maybe the image was bad, so I created a disk image instead of a system image. Same error. After a couple of reboots and repair attempts, it does show slightly different messages, like The boot configuration data file doesn’t contain valid information for an operating system 0xc0000098 but the problem remains.

Time for a more desperate approach. I take the M.2 storage thing out of the target machine and stick it into the reference machine. PXE Boot into Aomei Backup and clone the disk. Put the M.2 thing back into the target machine and start the machine. Surely it will run now.

Nope. Same error. I'm stunned. Must be a problem with Aomei Backup. So I used DriveClone to clone the disks. Same error when starting Windows. In despair I searched again for the message displayed and this time looked at some other search results. One of the solutions was to boot into the Recovery Environment and execute bcdboot c:\windows. Low and behold, Windows started! Finally solved. Well.... not quite. Did the same thing for the remaining 5 machines and they ALL had boot problems, where one would be fixed with the aforementioned command, but for others, I had to clone the disk a couple of times before I got Windows running on all of them. Then found out one of the machines had turned on Bitlocker on both drives. But that's another story.

The thing is - I don't know what I'm doing wrong. I can't figure out the problem - how come Windows on a cloned drive not working right away? Since I don't know what's causing the problem, I can't figure out a proper solution. Can anyone enlighten me?