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  • 1.  Win7 64bit Sysprep Imaging and General Questions

    Posted Aug 02, 2012 01:18 PM

    Hello all,

     

    I currently have a Symantec Ghost 11.5 ghostcast server setup for imaging my Windows XP computers via WinPE. With Windows XP computers, everything is working correctly with my WinPE process. This Summer, I am now imaging Windows 7 64-bit on HP ProBook 6570b laptops. I am hoping to copy over the software/driver settings installed as the local administrator account in "Audit Mode" via an unattend.xml file.

    I am using a seperate Windows XP laptop to build my unattend.xml file via the Windows Automated Installation Kit for Windows 7. I have built my attend.xml file and start prepping my Windows 7 laptop. I built my unattend.xml used the .clg file from the OEM Windows 7 64-bit CD that came with the 6570b laptop. I added the CopyProfile true value to my Microsoft-Windows-Security-SPP-US_6.1.7600 component listed under 4 specialize.

    I have opened a 6570b laptop from the box, booted into "Audit Mode", setup the administrative account software/drivers, i created a folder called scripts on the 6570b that I will be running sysprep in the %WINDIR%\Setup\ directory. I created a CMD file in that scripts folder with the following commands to delete the copies of the xml file after sysprep:

    del /Q /F c:\windows\system32\sysprep\unattend.xml

    del /Q /F c:\windows\panther\unattend.xml

    I then right-clicked, opened a new command prompt window in the c:\windows\system32\sysprep directory, and ran the sysprep /generalize /oobe /shutdown /unattend:unattend.xml command.

    The laptop started sysprep and shutdown. I then added the 6570b NIC drivers to my Ghost Boot WinPE Image, powered the laptop, and booted into PXE.

    The laptop booted into ghost and I was able to pull the sysprepped image via unicast. Now, here are my questions:

    When creating the image, I am asked if I want to compress the file. My options are: No, Fast, and High. I initially opted for the "No" compression option, since this is my first time imaging Windows 7 (I did not want to screw it up). My image size ended up being 79.4Gb. Do I want to choose Fast or High compression?

    When deploying my sysprepped image, I received a CRC32 error. I know that this is related to temporary files and the checksum not matching, etc. The Symantec article that I read basically stated that I should run the file integrity check and if the image passes; I can ignore this crc32 error. Is this a correct statement? Is there anything else I should do after running the file integrity check to make sure that my image is not corrupt?

    Lastly, when I deploy my unsysprepped Windows 7 image that I created before adding the unattend.xml file to the laptop; I receive a "Application Error 25058" stating: Unable to locate enough contiguous free space to loan run.... etc etc. The laptop DOES have enough space; I know that it does... Is this because I did not compress that image?

    Any ideas/comments are welcome. If I am doing something wrong, please feel free to point it out.

    Thank you,

    AndyzSym



  • 2.  RE: Win7 64bit Sysprep Imaging and General Questions

    Posted Aug 03, 2012 09:04 AM

    >Do I want to choose Fast or High compression?

    Do you really need to ask?  If you have the time, choose HIGH otherwise choose FAST ;-)

    >Is there anything else I should do after running the file integrity check to make sure that my image is not corrupt?

    Do a test restore on another machine and check that the image works as expected. Avoid the temptation to store the image on optical media or cheap USB drives.  

    > Lastly....

    Please clarify the method of deployment, and the partition structure on the target machine. A vendor machine may have a maintenance partition at the start of the disk, so if you are trying to deploy a partition image to a small partition it is inevitably going to fall over.