Adventures with Sysprep on Windows Vista

May 25th, 2007 Posted in Windows Vista

Windows Vista LogoI've just spent the last 3 days working with sysprep and the Windows System Image Manager which comes as part of the Windows Automated Installation Kit (WAIK) trying to get our unattend.xml file just right for deployment.  After several tries, I found that once I hit a certain point I would start getting fatal errors and would need to reinstall Vista from scratch.  Doing some Google whacking showed me that this was a pretty common problem.  If you're experiencing this problem, don't sweat it because there's an easy solution to allow you to use sysprep more than 3 times.

 The limit of 3 times which seems like an arbitrary number really isn't; it's tied to Vista's new licensing model.  Sysprep causes the licensing timer to rearm, setting it back to 30 days before you need to enter a license key.  In a previous article, I mentioned how to rearm the timer manually so you could extend your trial to 120 days.  The solution is to add the following line to the generalize pass of your unattend.xml file:

PLAIN TEXT
XML:
  1. <component name="Microsoft-Windows-Security-Licensing-SLC" processorArchitecture="x86" publicKeyToken="31bf3856ad364e35" versionScope="nonSxS" xmlns:wcm="http://schemas.microsoft.com/WMIConfig/2002/State" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" language="neutral">
  2. <skiprearm>1</skiprearm>
  3. </component>

This keeps the timer from being rearmed during the Sysprep and thus eliminates the problem.

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