Sysprep Question - Pulling Bios Info

[Guest]

Howdy,

I've never used Sysprep before and don't really know how it works. However,
what we are trying to do is use Sysprep to pull the serial number from the
BIOS of our Dell Laptops and then take that serial number and use it as the
computer name.

Everything else is already setup and good to go, it's just renaming the
computer that we need. Can anyone offer any assistance with how I can go
about doing this?

Thanks.

 

[WM]

Alas, you have a paradox. To get BIOS info like that, you need WMI. At the
point you need to enter the machine name, WMI is not yet reliably available,
I don't believe. Your best bet is to proceed through setup assigning a
random name - log on as Administrator and do the machine rename and domain
join there...

 

[Steve Adams]

Howdy,

I've never used Sysprep before and don't really know how it works. However,
what we are trying to do is use Sysprep to pull the serial number from the
BIOS of our Dell Laptops and then take that serial number and use it as the
computer name.

Everything else is already setup and good to go, it's just renaming the
computer that we need. Can anyone offer any assistance with how I can go
about doing this?

Thanks.

You have a few options avilable to you:

1. Boot from WinPE and download image
Boot from WINPE (must be WINPE 2004 with WMI support enabled)
Use WMI query from WINPE to collect harwdare information
Download the syspreped image (Do not reboot)
Mount freshly imaged drive and modify sysprep.inf hardware info
Reboot
Sysprep with now run minisetup and configure the hardware

2. Download syspred image using any system you want (DOS, WINPE, PXE)
Boot hardware and download syspreped image
Configure the image to use a run once key afeter sysprep has
finished and use a WMI query to collect hardware information and rename
the PC.

I have succesfully used both methods in our environment.

Hope that gives you something to start with.