tricky sysprep question

[Ashala]

hello fellow FH readers

i have been working on a Core image for my company for some days now and made a batch file that configures something in the registery base and that works fine when i just run the bat file.

what im having problems with, is when the computer is coming out of sysprep and are in windows (charastics blue windows background color) with a little gray box op in left cornor saying something like "configuring windows....configuring Outlook Extress etc etc" which all in all takes about 15-20 secs.

then what the script has done is overwritten.

my question is this, is there anywhere in either windows or in the sysprep .inf file a place to disable this little setup window that comes up right before windows is completely finished ?

thanks in advance!

 

[Ashala]

stupid fix was to make it HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE instead of CURRENT_USER

quite obvious actually hehe

anyways if people are still readying, in my epic quest to make the perfect core image im now looking for a solution to keep IIS even after sysprep, it seems like it fucks IIS up when sysprepping so if anyone know a fix to this, please let me know here

 

[Kryten]

I'll let you know in the next couple of weeks - I'm fiddling with sysprep at the moment.

Quick scenario, we rebuild and refurbish (recycle) computers, some new, some old (oldest we deal with is p3 600 for laptops and p4 1.7 for desktops). We get many many different sorts in, but they have to be securely wiped with government approved software, then sent to our sales people.
Sales people are no longer happy to do windows installation and final checks, so this is coming to me (I'm the engineer that repairs these things in the first place).
Most of our kit comes in batches from the same companies, so it's often 20-50 (or even more) of the same sort of laptops.

Ideally this gives me the scope to install windows in batch over the network, which is far faster than by CD, one by one. Using a Symantec Ghost image with GhostCast and TFTPD32, the machines are plugged into the network, boot up from PXE and the image is transferred. Reboot, and windows is there with all the drivers and applications installed that we want, as per the image (specific to that machine). Then of course Sysprep comes in, setting it up for the final touches such as machine names and the licenses.


Just about half way through setting this up - we should have the hardware and scope to run about 32 installations at any one time, but it's the first time I've really ventured into this and all a large learning process
Certainly never used Ghostcast or Sysprep (on this scale) before but theres a lot of great information out there that's getting me through

So keep us informed anyway and I'll do the same

 

[Gahn]

My wide guess is that the Sysprep on a new machine fucks up the IWAM_NameofMachine and IUSR_Nameofmachine accounts.
If that's the case u could try to remove em before sysprepping and see how it goes.

 

[Ashala]

hey again guys

i found this great article about doing a "core" syspreped image, it also introduces a new tool called MySysprep which are working together with sysprep and adding some new functions which could be nice.

ADMIN BROMO: How To Create a Universal Ghost Image Using Sysprep and Mysysprep

 

[Kryten]

Will have a goosey at that.
Gotta start building the hardware to do all of the above then will be playing more with sysprep

 

[Ashala]

okay here is what i found out :

if your having problems with IIS on a SP2 installation after sysprepping then :

go to windows\System32\Inetsrv\MetaBack and delete iischema-update.md0 just before syspreppping, that should do it, atleast it did it for me

The IIS and SMTP services do not start when you deploy a Windows XP SP2 Sysprep image on your Windows XP SP2-based computer