Deployment and Imaging Group

Hello, my apologies if this has already been posted elsewhere but I was not able to find anything on it.

I am working on creating a Windows 10 image job for our environment. We have about 3500 workstations in total. I have been able to capture and deploy a windows 10 enterprise image, however, it always images with a unique name. When we reimage we typically need the computer to retain the same name. For labs/classrooms that have 25+ computers, it would be quite tedious to have to manually rename each computer after reimaging. For windows 7, we were able to use the computername string in the unattend file. I found the following article from microsoft that this is no longer possible in windows 10.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows-hardware/customize/desktop/unattend/microsoft-windows-shell-setup-computername

Has anyone else encountered this with windows 10? Any suggestions?

Any feedback would be appreciated.

Thanks,

Dan

Hey Dan,

This functionality is native to GSS when using the built-in create/deploy image tasks.  The way it works is that the default answer file on the server contains a token - usually something like this:

<ComputerName>%COMPNAME%</ComputerName>

This token/variable will resolve to the unique computer name of each system you are imaging.
 

Example: if you are imaging Computer1, %COMPNAME% will resolve to Computer1 and that is the name it will have when sysprep runs after imaging. Same goes for Computer2, Computer3, etc...

If for some reason this is not working natively, I can also help you force this to occur with native batch/cmd scripting, but normally this just works out of box.
 

PS: One prerequisite for this is that the system must be known to the altiris database as the name you wish to keep.  If the computer record is brand new to the database it will usually be set to the serialnumber of the system which may be where your hangup is occuring.  If the system is known to the database as the serialnumber that is the name it will keep after imaging.  To fix this, simply reconfigure the name to "Computer1" so that the database has that value.  Once you do this, you can reimage the system and it will preserve the name "Computer1."

If this solves your issue, kindly mark this as a solution.  Thanks :)

I had actually tried using <ComputerName>%COMPNAME%</ComputerName> without success. I tried it again after moving to the latest build and it now works for me. 

For anyone else, I was using 1607 and now it is working on 1709.

Great! glad it is working for you :)

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