Unsolved Best Practice for Sysprep

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I have recently created a Windows 7 image. Put simply the process I have followed is below:

• Build a clean Windows 7 machine
• Customise machine to our company requirements
• Create sysprep file using Windows System Image Manager and copy to clean machine
• Run sysprep /generalize /oobe /shutdown /unattend:sysprep.xml
  In the unattended file I have used the CopyProfile with true in the specialize part and used SkipRearm at 1 in the generalize part
• Start up in WinPE and capture image
• Deploy image to clients
  The problem I have is that the activation grace period is not being reset each time I deploy the image. Because of this every machine I image is using the grace period start date of the original clean image. For the first 30 days everything worked fine as the grace period had not expired. Now every new machine I image shows a window when the machine is first logged onto saying that the grace period has expired, and asking the user to activate the machine. You can click Activate Now and the machine activates fine, but this is obviously no good as a permanent solution.

Giovanni,

I hope all is well. Ahhhhh, sysprep… I feel your pain.

The good news is that I believe the solution is pretty simple.

There are 1 or 2 items in the file that may not be set correctly.

Take a look at the following:

https://theitbros.com/sysprep-a-windows-7-machine-start-to-finish-v2/

Read through the steps and the discussion of how the unattend file is created, by section, and the settings used. Pay attention to the stuff in Step 6: specialize AND the stuff further down under oobeSystem.

I think if you verify what you have against what is shown, you should figure out your issue.

Please let me know if it works out after you have a chance to take a look and try it out.

Good luck !!

Cheers,

Adam

Tanks i will take a look, one point that i forgot to mention is that most of the time we have to install Windows offline so we cannot user KMS or MAK Activation

Hi @Giovanni-Baldi

It's been a bit since I've needed to do this in Windows 7, but from what I recall you need some of those settings you are using in the unattend.xml when installing the image, not in the sysprep stage. The main one is the copy profile flag, as the copying of the administator user profile settings over to the default profile is actually done during installation, so nothing will happen if you set it in your sysprep.xml

If the skip rearm and copy profile flags are the only things that you are setting in your sysprep.xml currently, I would suggest sysprepping the unit without applying a sysprep.xml file (I believe it does the re-arm automatically if I remember right), and then image a system with your copyprofile flag set in the unattend.xml file instead.

I've found that pretty much everything you would be looking to do in your sysprep.xml can be done in the unattend.xml and seems to work better when handled there.