Well i found i work around, but it will work on my favor only i guess, not as a general fix to the issue. Technically i just did the same thing but in a different and older bios ( INTEL board, dual core CPU, 4 GB RAM, 80 GB SATA )

My goals :

1 Create a Windows 7 image ( regardless of the hardware)
2 Be able to install this image on different hardware.
3 Different images for different departments within the company.

What i did :

1 Since i was having too many issues with a GIGABYTE board UEFI ready, which i am still not fully familiar with. I decide to get the image from a different board.

2 i installed the image on to a brand new i5 Gigabyte board with 500 GB HD. which it did, only that i found something interesting.

In windows XP (single disk NTFS only) fog will used the entire disk and just use whatever was used by windows for the installation( EX 10 GB ) In windows 7 ( Multiple partitions single disk ) i created the image from a 80 GB SATA HD and fog will use the 80 GB out of the 500 GB HD that i deployed to and leave the rest
unallocated, which for my purpose is really not a bad thing because i can just manually format that partition and use is for local data storage ( not what i wanted but hey )

3 Once i get it working i will create a a different image for our many different departments ( i did this with windows xp and works perfect for me ) this way i am just down to only
some windows updates and join the computer to the domain.

DOMAIN ENVIRONMENT

Now am facing a different issue, i i am just going to mentioned because all of you have been really helpful and i hope my findings help someone else later…

In windows XP i would just deploy the computer and after i was done before joining the computer to the domain i would just run NewSID which will modify any SID entries to avoid any SID
conflicts in my environment. It worked perfect and never had a single issue… Now i ran the NewSID in windows 7 ( as Administrator ) then after the computer restarted windows will not boot again.

I can try to find a work around to this but i don’t want to have to do this all the time. I looked for a NewSid alternative for Win7, but the closes is to run sysprep with the unattended file which i was trying to avoid since i did not have to deal with it in widows xp but i guess i have to.

Again very much appreciated and i will post later my findings !!!

This couldn’t be a firewall thing could it?

sda2 has * boot marked.
sda2 is the 300mb part.

I think there’s a very easy problem/reason, why Win 7 Images (without Sysprep) don’t like Resizable images. It’s likely due to the mbr of the drive. When an image is created using Multi-part, it creates a copy of the mbr and both of the partitions/all of the partitions.

When an image is created using resizable, it creates the 100mb and system image, but the mbr is provided by the FOG script init.gz file.

I believe, and I don’t know how to fix that part of it, the mbr this particular method uses is a copy of a sysprepped (generalized) image so as to allow any size drive. If you copy the mbr of a non-sysprepped image, you are, basically, taking the partitioning table with you (as well as the size of the drive it was created on).

Just my thoughts.

Hi Tom, thanks for your quick reply!
The PCs come actually with the 100 MB partition.
I will have a look at the documentation carefully and I will image not the entire disk but just the Windows 7 partition and see how it goes.
I will post my results after I’m done with the task.

You can also change the sleep time for the snap ins, change this in your image and see if this helps: [url]http://fogproject.org/forum/threads/how-to-modify-your-snapinclient-dll-file-to-check-in-more-quickly-on-a-reboot.613/[/url]

Thanks Tim;
I will give it a try and be back with the result.

I’ve had personal experience with this issue and I can confirm the fact that you HAVE to switch your HD mode from AHCI to IDE in order for your computer to boot properly

I’m assuming this issue is happening on both XP and Windows 7? Or is it limited to only Windows 7 machines?

I ask because it could be a permissions issue. I don’t know much about how to install local printers to a host as I haven’t had to play with them too much. All of our printers are on a printer server, so we use the network printer option for our systems. It works, mostly, but once in a while we get the IDS Message, and these are on Windows 7 systems. Once we acknowledge those messages they install fine. We don’t get those messages or issues on our Windows XP machines though.

It makes me think the printer is trying to install as the local user rather than the Administrator of the system.

Interesting. We use 2012 as a hyper-V host. Our DC and DHCP (and DNS) are a 2k12 guest. FOG is an ubuntu guest. No issues for us. 2k12 “66” is an IP address (of the fog guest) 2k12 “67” is pxelinux.0 NFS for fog (mounted) storage is hosted on a openfiler NAS external to the VM

No issues for us. Do you use WDS or SCCM ? They both have PXE options which could muddy things.

As an aside, your hyper-v host is your gateway?

The main reason for sysprep on a large network is SID/CMIDs for the machines. If you plan on using a KMS server then you will have issues in activating the machines; similar to this [url]http://support.microsoft.com/kb/929829[/url] . Even if you have rearm counts remaining these SID/CMIDs DO NOT reset on a /rearm. If you use WSUS then these will all share the same CMID so again the WSUS database will incorrectly report the status of each machine. If your client machines need something from the enterprise CA these will report an incorrect CMID pair when issuing certificates.

Personally I would get the image sysprep’d with /generalize

I discovered this the hard way after W7 was released. I moved from XP to W7 thinking I could use the same tricks in W7 that I did in XP (and W2000)- use GPOs to reset the IDs with utilities - but you cannot.

Thanks Tom - that’s very good advice. In addition, we also offer a very handy removal utility for our toolbar in the unlikely event it doesn’t nicely uninstall from Programs Features. The utility is available here:

[url]http://help.ask.com/link/portal/30015/30018/Article/1/How-do-I-remove-the-Ask-com-Toolbar[/url]

Best,
Eric
Ask.com

It’s Windows 7, FOG .32, and whatever client ships with FOG.32. I have another Windows 7 image that does not have this behavior, so I have to think that it’s just something that I did differently, but I can’t fathom what it could be. I disabled UAC to see if that was the cause, but it is not. Perhaps I had UAC disabled when I built my first image, and this second one I did not disable UAC while building the image? I dunno.

Figured it out. Our network administrator placed prelinux.0 in 067 instead of pxelinux.0. Simple typo! So glad that’s all it was. Everything is working perfectly now. Upload my first image!! 🙂

Well, I would have agreed with you 2 weeks ago… then I got desperate and started trying everything under the sun.

TL;DR: it worked!!!

So here is the long of it. the reason my images wouldn’t pull as “Single Disk, NTFS Only, Resizable”(SDNOR) is because the “system reserved”(rec.img.000) partition was bigger than the 100mb default, and in the wrong place on the disk (/dev/sda2 instead of sda1). so I figured I could pull the image off the machine and rearrange them and then push it back to another system; but, as you said, the “Multiple Partition, Single disk” (MPSD) pulls the MBR as well. So rearranging the partitions doesn’t work.

What I did to get it working was this.

I installed my company’s Golden Image on computer A. I installed an OEM version of Win7 Enterprise on computer B. (with default partition configuration) I resized the partitions on A to the smallest sizes I could with disk man’s NTFS Shrink I pulled a MPSD image from A; and a SPNOR image from B. I created a new image and made it SPNOR. (Call it C) I copied rec.img.000 from B’s image to C I copied d1p1.img from A’s image (the large partition with the majority of the disk on it) to C and renamed it sys.img.000 I pushed image C to computer C and lo-and-behold… wait for it… It worked!!!

Now the partitions are in the right order, and properly sized, so I can create a new SPNOR image off of this computer without any problems!!!

Also as one of my colleagues suggested I checked to make sure that Bitlocker would still work and it does.

So yes, you can just rename the files in an image to change it from MPSD to SPNOR; because SPNOR doesn’t save the MBR like MPSD does. Granted you can’t go the other direction (SPNOR to MPSD) but I can’t think of a reason anyone would want to right now anyway 😃

I don’t think there is much of a difference other than having more products licensed. If you have KMS host keys avialable in your VLSC, you can use them to activate a KMS server for that product. And you can use the same KMS server to KMS activate multiple products.

What version of FOG were you using when this happened to you? I haven’t seen any issues with this as we, in 2011, had received systems with Windows 7, but were, at that time, supporting Windows XP. We created the Windows XP image and uploaded to the relevant system and had no issues that I’m aware of. We were using FOG 0.32, and still are.

[quote=“Jaymes Driver, post: 14260, member: 3582”]That’s insane!!! Well I’m glad you found it. We are still running office 2007, and I am pretty sure the SMART boards we use are the 400 model, but don’t quote me on that :)[/quote]

We Run 620’s pretty much everywhere… BUt i don’t think the software is any different between models… I am not sure what caused it… but for all but one of our sites its an unfixable problem…

As far as constant rebooting, I have encountered this, however I never troubleshot the problem, I just reverted to a previous snapshot and attempted to sysprep a little differently.

I have run into problems with the windows error reporting before the OS boots, but again, I just reverted to a previous snapshot and worked out the kinks.

[quote]Okay, so I read more and figured out that sysprep does what I need it to do. Questions though:

1.) What is sysprep actually doing?
2.) Can I only use it a max of 3 times?[/quote]

Sysprep releases the OS from the specifics of the hardware and thus allows it to be installed on another machine.
Sysprep takes care of all the mess of changing/deleting the registry values, and it allows the new hardware to write it’s ID information to the OS and will allow the OS to be activated.

KMS servers have to have a unique ID for each machine that wants to activate.

I do my sysprep process in a virtual environment and this will leave it open to any type of hardware, so long as I supply the drivers (i do so in the os and reference to them later with registry values). However you can also install the OS on a hardware to install updates, programs, etc then audit. After you update the Windows installation, at the command line run the Sysprep /audit /generalize /shutdown command to configure Windows to boot the computer to audit mode. You can then capture the Windows image.

Use the new model-specific reference image to install Windows on a new computer. The Windows image is applied to the computer, and Windows boots to audit mode.

(Optional) You can install additional applications and other updates. You can also test the computer to verify that all components are working correctly.

After you update the Windows installation, run the Sysprep /oobe /shutdown command.
NOTE
If you install Windows images by using the Sysprep /generalize /oobe command, the user experience will not be ideal. On the next reboot after you run the Sysprep /generalize /oobe command, Windows runs the specialize configuration pass, Plug and Play, and other Setup tasks before Windows starts OOBE. This process can take additional time and can delay a customer’s first logon.

To answer your second question, YES you can sysprep more than three times.

One option is to use the Virtual setup I talked about and use snapshots to revert to a time before sysprep has been ran and update/push again.

OR

During the set up of your unattend.xml file you can skip re-arming the os and this THEORETICALLY gives the os 999 re-arms, it should be noted that this is heavily frowned upon and I highly recommend the virtual set up. Snapshot can save you a LOAD of time if you don’t have to re-set up the OS and install the damn updates again!

If you would like, I have a word document I have been using to keep track of my sysprep adventures, it would give you a good base to work from, and it is set up in a walkthrough style.

I’ve been having the same problem, I work in a surplus shop for a major campus and all I have coming through are Vista machines now. I’m going to keep looking for a solution so I can use the Resizeable ntfs option.

Thank you for stating what you used to fix your problem. I’ll try that until I can find a better option.