Sysprep and World Wide Publishing service

[David Dixon]

I've just encountered a problem with Windows XP (service pack 2) and
Sysprep. After loading a machine with XP, including IIS and XP SP2, I then
run Sysprep v2.0 (latest available) to prepare for imaging. After dumping
the Ghost image I reboot the machine to XP. At this point the World Wide
Web Publishing service fails to start. Attempts to manually start it result
in an error, "Could not stat the World Wide Web Publishing service on Local
Computer. Error 3: The system cannot find the path specified."
This problem only occurs on XP machines that have SP2 installed. BTW,
we disable the SP2 firewall before running Sysprep. Our only fix is to
remove IIS and reinstall IIS. The service starts OK after that. This is a
pain because our image includes changes to IIS that are a drag to have to
reconfigure after reinstalling IIS.
Has anyone else encountered this problem with WWWP failing after SP2
installation and Sysprep running? Anyone have any ideas? We've never seen
this error message before. Thanks!

David Dixon

 

[mattn]

Hi David,

MS give the answer to this issue as:

"This problem occurs because information that is required for Windows to
access the IIS metabase is incorrectly deleted when you run Sysprep with
the -nosidgen switch. As a result, Windows cannot access the IIS
configuration information"

http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=827385#kb2

I'm now having the same issue, except i can't get IIS to reinstall, did
you have this problem and if so how did you get around it?

cheers,

Matt