Showing posts with label deployment. Show all posts
Showing posts with label deployment. Show all posts

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.