The ESD is merely an encrypted ISO. MS, god bless them, have chosen to only send it in that format, for update purposes.
Only real reason I can think of, is a wrongly typed instruction, or a bad decrypt download. As we are all aware, the command line is unforgiving and a small typo can lead to a failure. This would result in a failure to write the ISO. During this process, the hardware is not involved in any way.
No. I cant see how it can be hardware related.except !!, the update is sometimes assuming, in certain cases, that the hardware drivers are already on the system. Running the ISO from boot, of course, assumes nothing and only puts in the drivers it has in the package.
But, going back to my first para, I do mean that I have never failed to produce the ISO. Installing on several different machines can, of course, have the usual hangups which we have all experienced before with previous OSs.