Tuesday, March 11, 2008

Completely automating Windows installation with Sysprep and Ghost

So I've been working on this particular gem all day, and I finally got it. Using Microsoft's Sysprep tool, you can remove all the unique identifiers of a machine prior to imaging it using Symantec Ghost. The tricky part is that we wanted to do it completely automated, on a scheduled task, with no human interaction, which meant that we had to created an answer file for Sysprep to use in the image preparation that would automatically generate a quasi-random computer name. I spent 4 hours trying to get it to work, and not getting it to work.
Finally I found that all you have to do is include the "ComputerName=" line in the [UnattendedGUI] field, and set it to "ComputerName=*". Otherwise, it wants confirmation of the random name before it continues.
Now that I've got this completed, it means we can completely automate our computer lab to re-image as often as we want with no worries about name or SID conflicts.

3 comments:

Emily said...

No way! I was just wondering about how to do that!

Margaret said...

It's always nice to work on a problem and finally figure it out.

Ben S said...

Hey bearded dude, how is the facial hair?