syspreping a vanilla windows golden image
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Hi all,
If your installing a vanilla golden image of Windows 10 ie literally just installing it on a pc then capturing it, not even doing a sysprep, is this advisable
But I thought you need to do a sysprep of it so you can deploy it to other pcs ie sysprep /oobe /generalize
Thanks,
Rob -
@robertkwild If you are capturing and deploying to the same exact model of computer you do not “need” to sysprep. BUT M$ recommendation is always sysprep a golden image to properly reset all of the SSIDs so that you don’t run into issues where two or more machines have the same machine ID (WSUS will get confused if this happens).
So its always best practice to sysprep with a customized unattend.xml file to preset your company standard settings for every image. Using the unattend.xml file prevents OOBE from asking questions during WinSetup making deploying an image lite-touch.
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Thanks @george1421 that’s what I thought, always sysprep even if it’s a golden image for installing on different hardware
Can I make an unattended answer file if I havnt got a windows volume license?
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@robertkwild I have never tried with OEM media. I know that I’ve heard reports of the setupcomplete.cmd file not running unless you use volume license media. As for processing the unattend.xml during OOBE, I guess one would have to try to be sure. I’ve had no need to test this idea. For a business that has 20 or more systems it doesn’t make much sense to not use VLK media. If you are deploying windows 10 pro and you have all windows 10 oem activated computers, you only need one windows 10 pro vlk license. You do have to get to 5 points so just pick up some server CAL licenses to get to 5 points. You can always use extra CAL licenses.
For the legal disclaimer part, MS OEM Eula doesn’t allow for creating a golden image with OEM media and then deploying a custom image. You need the VLK media for that. But in this case we are just talking about theoretical deployments.
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if i change any values in registry and then do a sysprep with oobe and generalize will the oobe part get rid of the changes and make it back to default settings
is there a limit how many times i can deploy this image with a sysprep, as i heard it can only be done 8 times?
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@robertkwild said in syspreping a vanilla windows golden image:
if i change any values in registry and then do a sysprep with oobe and generalize will the oobe part get rid of the changes and make it back to default settings
It really depends. Win10 will reset a lot of things when you sysprep it where Win7 you have a better chance with your registry settings staying. I would say if you are making registry settings in current user or users expect them to be rest. Most things in system and services will stay. Typically I will use the setupcomplete.cmd batch script to “fix” what MS reset during the imaging process.
is there a limit how many times i can deploy this image with a sysprep, as i heard it can only be done 8 times?
There is no limit on how many times you can deploy a sysprep image (well there is up to your license count). But I think you are thinking about resealing a sysprep’d image. That is 3 times. There is a registry hack to bypass that, but I use MDT to build my golden image for deployment from FOG. So I don’t have to deal with resealing a previously build and deployed image.
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thanks @george1421
btw, i found this, you can sysprep win10 up to 1001 times before recreating your image
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@robertkwild said in syspreping a vanilla windows golden image:
i found this, you can sysprep win10 up to 1001 times
Just to be a bit snarky, if you have to sysprep your image 1000 times, I think you might be doing something wrong or IT should not be your field of work.
But on the less snarky side its good to know the number and hopefully I’ll never personally need it. As I said we use MDT to build the golden image so I get a fresh from DVD image (with current windows updates) each time the golden image is recreated.