Thanks for the information about changing the serial number. I now just need to sort out how to automate this for 25 machines.

Hi,
I am brand new to FOG. I have installed a test system under Ubuntu 10.04, uploaded an XP SP3 image and successfully deployed to three machines. FOG looks superb, thanks and well done to all who have contributed.
I have a question about regular, unattended deployment to multiple machines.

First, some background. I am a volunteer IT administrator for an independent school in the UK. I’m retired now, but in my professional career I was an IBM mainframe systems and assenbler programmer. That is by way of explaining that my knowlege of the Linux and pc world is limited (but I can learn quickly!).

The school has about 25 Dell pc’s, running XP PRO SP3. These are all second-hand, donated from businesses, so all the machines have unique product licences and COA stickers (ie there’s no Volume Licence key). Up to now I have been manually deploying a single image from a master machine, by removing the hard drives and cloning them (with Clonezilla and other tools). This is hard work but generally I don’t have problems, as the machines are identical. However, occasionally I have been prompted to re-active the XP licence, and I don’t really understand the circumstances in which this happens I’m looking to using FOG to do regular network deployments.

Now, my question. Everything I have read makes me understand that I should use SYSPREP to prepare my common image. But, if I understand correctly, I can only set a single product licence in Sysprep? I want to achieve completely unattended deployment, so don’t want the deployed systems prompting for licence activation - or, if it does, I want some automated way of replying to the prompts with the correct (unique) licence key (side question - could I use “AutoIt” for this?).

It might help to know that I am not using a domain controller, the pc’s are simply in a workgroup, with a login script to map to a shared NAS drive for student folder access.

Thanks for bearing with me. I hope I have correctly explained the issue I have, and thanks in advance for your assistance.

Regards
Alan Reeves