Question for those of you who use "sysprep" -- why?

[Steve Maser]

Hi all,

I ran into an issue installing our
sysprep-with-mini-setup-made-on-an-Intel-box load set on an AMD box.

The solution was to change a reg key value. Which worked.

So did just deleting the reg key value -- which is what we had to do
because we couldn't boot in "safe" mode when the mini-setup hadn't run
yet.

So, we were thinking -- why are we "sysprepping" in the first place?


Is there any overall advantage to actually running sysprep vs. just
ghosting our non-sysprepped image, copying over the image, turning the
computer on and letting Plug-and-play detect the drivers on other
hardware? This is essentially what we did to detect/resolve this
problem with the AMD laptop.


Are we missing something overall that's advantageous to us installing a
sysprepped load set on new hardware? *Or* running "mini-setup" at
start if we aren't forcing a change of computer name or other
machine-specific info in our sysprep.ini file? If we retain the method
we currently do, we'd have to have two separate hardware loadsets (that
run "mini-setup") for Intel and AMD and that seems like it's just
wrong.

(It's been *years* since we set up this sysprep method. I honestly
can't remember if we researched this at that time or not. So the
question came up again and I thought I'd ask those that might actually
know why.)

Anybody with thoughts on this?

- Steve

 

[Cleve S.]

Steve,

The biggest reason for running Sysprep is to change the SID. Some
applications, like WSUS (Windows Software Update Service), look at the SID
and not the machine name. I'd say you're asking for problems if you don't
change the SID. There are other methods, but only Sysprep is supported by
Microsoft.

Cleve S.

 

[Hunter1]

Nah, there's all sorts of apps out there that are heaps simpler if all
you want to do is change the SID, we used to use Newsid when we had
seperate images for each hardware platform. Sysprep is more for getting
a hardware independent image up and running, and whilst it takes a fair
bit of tinkering it works beautifully for that when you get it right. As
for letting plug and play sort out the hardware, apart from being a tad
messy we've found that rarely works, and with XP will generally lead to
needing manual intervention to correct hardware issues, if you can even
boot up at all.

That being said we're 100% Intel, no AMD, I'm not sure how the HAL
setting (the most critical setting) would work with this. We've found
that setting the HAL to Advanced Configuration and Power Interface seems
to work on nearly all hardware platforms, and we're about to play with
the sysprep.inf to try to get the damn thing to allow us to get proper
multiprocessor or uniprocessor settings in there instead of this "one
HAL fits most" approach, appears it can be done, but like anything
Sysprep related, I'm sure we'll need to do a bit of tinkering.