Batch and Command Line rendering is presenting serious challenges for Maya Hair rendering through Maya Software rendering. If you think how can that be? The posting is here..would love your feedback (area.autodesk.com/forum/autodesk-maya/lighting---rendering/eliminate-hair-run-up-on-batch-render/)

However, if you have an alternative such as a MEL or Python script for rendering individual frames and saving them. That would be extremely helpful.

Best Regards,
-Michael

creative carsh has some scripts that will render into the render view and save the image, so that you don’t have t do a batch render. I assume that’s what you’re looking for?

As for the real cause of the problem; there have been some issues with the hair caches not being read in older versions; check that the path is correct for the Cache File Name of the diskCache node node. It should be called cache_hairSystemShape1.