Sysprep across multiple machines

I came across this post on Joshers Weblog and it fixed a bunch of problems for me. Disabling the soundcard was a great help – I’ve been trying to get audio to work for about a month, and the solution is as easy as this. Aren’t blogs great?from the weblog:

I have a single image for Dell OptiPlex GX1, GX110, GX150, GX200, GX260, GX270, and several Dell laptops, plus Gateway E-3200, E-4200.

Key elements of cross-hardware platform compatibility:

Before saving your image, change the hard drive controller to “Standard Dual PCI IDE Controller” (or something like that, I may not have stated it 100% correctly but you’ll find it). Afer installing the image on a target computer, change the HDC to the correct one for that platform (can be scripted using the MS devcon tool).

Set Sysprep to run a hardware detection at startup (sysprep.exe -pnp -mini -reseal -quiet).

For the GX260 and GX270 you’ll have to download the chipset drivers and extract them with the -a switch, then put them in a location in your image and tell Sysprep to look for them there (OemPnPDriversPath=”\Drivers\GX260;\Drivers\GX270″) where “drivers” is a folder off the root of C:.

When creating your image, disable the sound card (onboard) or remove it (add-in) during image creation on your master computer.

For profiles:

Install all programs under the same user name when creating the image. Set up desktop icons, Internet Explorer settings, everything you want to be customized, under that profile. Before saving the image, copy that profile on top of the Administrator profile, then delete the profile you used to create the image (you can’t copy to/from or delete a profile that’s in use, so you’ll need a third user ID to do this). After your image is deployed to a target computer, use the Administrator profile to over-write the Default User profile. This is the only method I’ve found to have a customized profile survive Sysprep.

To have sysprep join your domain:

[Identification]
DomainAdmin=
DomainAdminPassword=
JoinDomain=

In the above, you must use a username that is a domain user name (i.e., not a local account) and that has admin rights on the computer.

I’ve got this down to an art, there’s probably more stuff I could put here. Feel free to contact me if you have any questions.

I used the wrong e-mail address in the post above (we just changed). This one is correct: Richard.Benke@wwrc.virginia.gov.