Automating OOBE setup?

[Stucraster]

Hi all,

Me and my organisation are new to FOG but have been needing to move away from our ActiveBoot imaging for quite some time.

We have set up our FOG server, tested and working all is fine - even down to Renaming the machine and joining it to the domain.

Previously when we take an image we delete the local user that we setup (We don’t activate the Administrator account) we Sysprep the machine, reboot and take the image. Then when we load an image to a machine it boots up to the OOBE setup. We put our local account name back in and all other details needed.

With FOG, we can obviously still do this. I can enter our local account name, and I can even enter any random computer name as after this setup is complete, FOG takes over and renames the machine and joins it to the domain.

Is there a way I can automatically complete this OOBE? Is there a way to skip this setup and have the account created automatically? I have looked at an unattend.xml however, this seems to go above and beyond what I need it to do.

Many thanks,
Stu

[Quazz]

You will have to use an unattend.xml for that as you’ve already discovered. You can add to it what you need and ignore most of the rest, to be honest.

[george1421]

You can start your basic configuration using this tool: http://windowsafg.no-ip.org/win10x86_x64.html Then discard parts you don’t need like disk creation. Include more bits if you need different actions. Then when you have your unattend.xml file perfected then build your reference (golden, mother, master) image. When you are ready to sysprep place the unattend.xml file in c:\windows\panther directory and call sysprep with this command:
c:\windows\system32\sysprep\sysprep.exe /quiet /generalize /oobe /shutdown /unattend:C:\Windows\Panther\Unattend.xml

This will prepare the system for cloning, and tell OOBE to use your custom unattend.xml file.

[Stucraster]

Thanks!

If I didn’t remove the local account before Sysprep, can I just ignore anything account related in the unattend.xml?

[george1421]

@stucraster You can ignore it or make changes to it. I don’t know if sysprep will disable the admin account or not. But the unattend.xml and setupcomplete.cmd files are the way to tweak the final OS to have the features you need. These files would be dropped into place just before you run sysprep. Actually when I build my reference image, I have a batch script that copies the files into the right location and then calls sysprep to ensure everything is in the right spot each time I rebuild the reference image.