Unbelievable. I have yet to fine ONE article anywhere that walks you through how to use Sysprep. This article comes close, then simply does not provide step-by-step instructions for first timers.

asdg3/9/2006 11:30:24 AM

I'm reading through Sysprep ref.chm and find no sysprep -clean reference. Is this an undocumented switch?

Anonymous User 3/24/2005 10:47:35 AM

this seems to be wrong:
add the command
sysprep -quiet
to the [GuiRunOnce] section of the sysprep.inf file.

do not add it to sysprep.inf but to unattend.txt

Thomas Dallas 11/26/2002 1:16:15 AM

We use the XP sysprep and Norton Ghost to make a single image for multiple computer platforms. First change the bus master IDE controller in Device Manager to the Standard PC IDE Controller. Reboot to make the change effective. Then remove the IDE controller from the Device Manager. DO NOT REBOOT! We run our antivirus install program here, which modifies the "RunOnce" registry key to run the antivirus setup at next boot. Then run the Sysprep utility, do not use the "Plug and Play" option. Reboot the computer with a DOS disk and use your DOS-based imaging utility (we use Ghost) to save an image of the hard drive. When a machine is re-imaged with this image, the XP mini-setup will run, detecting any hardware specific to that machine. This requires a reboot after detection of the correct bus-master IDE driver.
Footnote: After one sysprep, if you repeat the sysprep process, sometimes a machine will have difficulty joining a Win2000 AD. We have solved that by keeping two versions of each image, the first prior to the sysprep operation, and the second after the sysprep operation. If we ned to make modifications to the image, we start with the first image.

Chris Cantwell 11/25/2002 10:44:04 AM

I have been using Sysprep on new PCs since the first of the year without using the pnp switch. We recently ran into a problem where the vendor had changed something minor and using the image was producing a blue screen when used on the PCs. I thought the pnp switch would solve this problem and was delighted to find out about it.
However, when I tested the switch on a PC I prepared for Sysprep, it caused the cloned computer to bluescreen on the first Windows reboot! Taking the switch off and Sysprep-ing again fixed the problem.
Have you seen this before and what might the problem be?
Thank you,


Jan Hall 6/25/2002 8:37:20 AM