I have a win 7 sysprepped image that deploys to various machines with no particular problems.

However when I try to image a machine with the sysprepped image installed (hoping to avoid the long install and reboot cycle that normally ensues), it goes on to a machine (very closely matched in hardware) ok, but then
prompts for an Administrator login and then immedialy asks for confirmation to go ahead and reboot. Once that boot finishes the machine gets to a login screen which only allows Administrator (local machine) to login. However, in this state it will not respond to pings or remote desktop requests. Once you login on the console though it reboots. Finally it seems to be happy with Active Directory and I can login as a domain user and all is well.

I’m really trying to get the process to work unattended as we have a bunch of headless machines that we’d like to be able to automatically image and this need to login three times is painful.

Any hints?

It occurs to me that (with some work) you could use something like bit torrent to distribute images (as a poor mans alternative to multicast). Advantages are that blocks could come in in any order (so machines would not have to boot in lockstep), and all machines might contribute to uploading blocks so the network IO would be spread out over multiple machines (though the total network capacity is still the same).

Disadvantages are that the software becomes rather more complex and there would be no real boost to speed if machines tend to be imaged one at a time.