Can I sysprep after the fact?

[Telecom Consultant]

I am familiar with cloning and sysprep, but I ran into a situation
today at home, whereby my wife's computer died (more accurately her
hard drive) so now that I have replaced it I want to spare myself the
pain and trouble of doing a manual install and obviously I figured
cloning my PC would be the quickest way.

There are significant hardware differences however so, what I could do
is sysprep my machine, clone it and image it to hers *BUT* that would
mean I would lose the functionality of my machine and have to go
through the restoring drivers etc.

I am wondering if it is somehow possible for me to ghost my computer
without syspreping it, image my wife's and *THEN* somehow sysprep hers
from a command prompt or something?

the only other way I can figure on doing this is to ghost my machine,
then sysprep my machine, then ghost it again and then restore the
non-syspreped image, but that seems like a pain.

TIA

 

[Adam Leinss]

I am familiar with cloning and sysprep, but I ran into a situation
today at home, whereby my wife's computer died (more accurately
her hard drive) so now that I have replaced it I want to spare
myself the pain and trouble of doing a manual install and
obviously I figured cloning my PC would be the quickest way.

There are significant hardware differences however so, what I
could do is sysprep my machine, clone it and image it to hers
*BUT* that would mean I would lose the functionality of my machine
and have to go through the restoring drivers etc.

I am wondering if it is somehow possible for me to ghost my
computer without syspreping it, image my wife's and *THEN* somehow
sysprep hers from a command prompt or something?

the only other way I can figure on doing this is to ghost my
machine, then sysprep my machine, then ghost it again and then
restore the non-syspreped image, but that seems like a pain.

Use NewSID: http://www.sysinternals.com/ntw2k/source/newsid.shtml.

I actually used this in a learning center at work. I made a dual-boot
Windows 98/Windows 2000 image. Windows 2000 was on the second
partition. When the sysprep ran it kept changing the ARC path to the
WINNT folder in the boot.ini to the first partition and Windows 2000
would then fail to load. So I made a image as usual, but did not
sysprep it. Then I used NewSID on each PC. I could then join each to
the domain without problems.

Sysinternals has other slick stuff check it out!

Adam

 

[Adam Leinss]

I am familiar with cloning and sysprep, but I ran into a situation
today at home, whereby my wife's computer died (more accurately
her hard drive) so now that I have replaced it I want to spare
myself the pain and trouble of doing a manual install and
obviously I figured cloning my PC would be the quickest way.

There are significant hardware differences however so, what I
could do is sysprep my machine, clone it and image it to hers
*BUT* that would mean I would lose the functionality of my machine
and have to go through the restoring drivers etc.

I am wondering if it is somehow possible for me to ghost my
computer without syspreping it, image my wife's and *THEN* somehow
sysprep hers from a command prompt or something?

the only other way I can figure on doing this is to ghost my
machine, then sysprep my machine, then ghost it again and then
restore the non-syspreped image, but that seems like a pain.

Sorry, I should have read this a bit more carefully!

Yes, you can sysprep after the fact. As long as the IDE controllers
are simliar you should be OK.

Adam

 

[Telecom Consultant]

Ok . major problems!

I have syspreped and imaged hundreds of machines before, but have
never run into this problem. I figured that I can't run sysprep from a
command prompt to sysprep an image that has not already undergone the
sysprep process..so....I made a standard image of my machine. Then
syspreped it and created another image (two images, one syspreped the
other not).

I then proceeded to ghost my wife's machine with the syspreped version
of mine. On reboot it goes to the "starting windows" screen gets to
100% and freezes.

Ok, so I figure that there must be some hardware issue, so I
re-sysprep my machine with the -pnp switch and create another image. I
rebooted my machine (the source machine) to see what would happen and
I ended up with a blue screen error and couldn't get into windows. No
idea why that would happen as I figured on getting the usual
mini-setup and a enumeration of all plug and play devices, but no. I
restored my machine from the first non-syspreped image and all is ok
now.

As for my wife's machine, I used the -pnp switched version of the
image and upon restart the same thing. Windows Starting 100% and it
hangs.

I can't figure this out but the only major difference is the source
machine is an Intel 815 based chipset and the destination machine is a
SiS chipset. Is there something I need to do to force the image to
redetect the motherboard chipsets? isn't the HAL already wiped? Is
there a way to do this from the registry as I can get into the imaged
machine by using Winternals ERD commander. Just trying to avoid
re-imaging the source machine again.

TIA

 

[Telecom Consultant]

I should add that I get the same thing when I try to boot to safemode
(starting...100%...hangs).

 

[Telecom Consultant]

I should also mention that I am going from a Intel P-III to an AMD
Duron processor. Maybe thats the problem.?
Should I look at removing the PCIIDE key under the ENUM registry entry
to get it to redetect the IDE drive controllers? I figured that I
would be getting inaccessable boot device if it was an IDE issue, but
Windows does seem to be starting just freezes right befor taking me to
the login screen.

 

[Adam Leinss]

I should also mention that I am going from a Intel P-III to an AMD
Duron processor. Maybe thats the problem.?
Should I look at removing the PCIIDE key under the ENUM registry
entry to get it to redetect the IDE drive controllers? I figured
that I would be getting inaccessable boot device if it was an IDE
issue, but Windows does seem to be starting just freezes right
befor taking me to the login screen.

I've been making progress on an image that now works on 3 different PCs
and 1 laptop using sysprep. Take a looksie at this work-in-progress:

http://stealth.kirenet.com/~aleinss/w2k_universial_image_guide.doc

Granted, this is for a company, but you can use the same steps at home.
I plan to upload all this information to my web site when it is tested
and polished.

It sounds like you either have a HAL issue or an IDE issue. Try this
line in your sysprep.inf under the [Unattended] section:

UpdateUPHAL=ACPIPIC_UP,C:\WINNT\Inf\Hal.inf

Adam

 

[Telecom Consultant]

snip> It sounds like you either have a HAL issue or an IDE issue. Try
this

line in your sysprep.inf under the [Unattended] section:

UpdateUPHAL=ACPIPIC_UP,C:\WINNT\Inf\Hal.inf

Adam

Thanks Adam,

It turns out that going from an Intel CPU to an AMD CPU is an
unsupported scenario with sysprep. Who knew? I had never run across
that before and figured it wouldn't matter, but alas, I had to bite
the bullet and do a clean install, total drag man. Oh well.

 

[Achmed]

Why can't you just boot off the win2k cd and do a repair?

snip> It sounds like you either have a HAL issue or an IDE issue. Try
this

line in your sysprep.inf under the [Unattended] section:

UpdateUPHAL=ACPIPIC_UP,C:\WINNT\Inf\Hal.inf

Adam

Thanks Adam,

It turns out that going from an Intel CPU to an AMD CPU is an
unsupported scenario with sysprep. Who knew? I had never run across
that before and figured it wouldn't matter, but alas, I had to bite
the bullet and do a clean install, total drag man. Oh well.

 

[Telecom Consultant]

Actually I tried that.

I imaged the system as described in my previous posts and tried doing
an in place upgrade to preserve the applications, but that had no
impact at all. Still froze up at 100% on the Starting Windows progress
screen.

I then proceeded to do a repair of the old system but that seems to
just check file versions and had no positive results. I then
proceeded to do an overlay install, but the apps where so messed up
that I just went back in and reformatted and did a fresh install. I
also used an ERD Commander CD to get into the system and edit the
registry, where as a last resort I deleted the entire ENUM branch.
That didn't work either.

Something in a Windows 2K/XP install is specific to the processor. I
just don't know what.

All in all a hard lesson to learn. I have imaged literally hundreds of
machines, but I have never run into a Intel to AMD situation. Go
figure

B

Why can't you just boot off the win2k cd and do a repair?

snip> It sounds like you either have a HAL issue or an IDE issue. Try
this

line in your sysprep.inf under the [Unattended] section:

UpdateUPHAL=ACPIPIC_UP,C:\WINNT\Inf\Hal.inf

Adam

Thanks Adam,

It turns out that going from an Intel CPU to an AMD CPU is an
unsupported scenario with sysprep. Who knew? I had never run across
that before and figured it wouldn't matter, but alas, I had to bite
the bullet and do a clean install, total drag man. Oh well.