Thoughtcrime

I currently have a sysprep'd Vista image sealed using sysprep /generalize /oobe /unattend:myfile.xml This image works fine if I deploy it onto Dell Latitude D820 (reference system it was built from), IBM Thinkpad G41, and IBM Thinkpad T60. When deploying to a Thinkpad T40 and T42 it simply hangs when booting. Enabling boot logging doesn't generate a log. Booting into Safe mode shows it loads all the drivers apparently as crcdisk.sys is the last loaded driver. I can install Vista manually on the T40 and T42 and it installs fine. Does anyone have any ideas what would cause this?

Try running the WAIK answer file editor on Vista itself - I've had little luck running it under XP.

If anyone's interested I figured out why this is happening (I think!). Vista and sysprep specifically do nto seem to like being run on systems where Vista is installed on any partitions other then the First Primary (or first, primary?) partition. I tried the following structure which failed: Primary/Primary - Vista on both first and second Primary/Logical - Vista on logical Only way I've been able to get sysprep to work is with: Primary/Logical - Vista installed on Primary. Extremely disappointing to see after all the hype about ImageX that we still seem to be stuck with crappy limitations of the DOS Age ...

I get this too - not entirely sure why. The way I got around this a while back was to install the WAIK tools in Vista, as opposed to on XP. If that still doesn't solve it, you may have a mismatched WAIK/Vista versions you're running. I was able to run the BDD 2007 Beta 2 version of WSIM from RC1, but have had issues with WAIK 6.0 RTM on XP SP2 generating the same error.

If you're doing this from within Vista, try disabling User Access Control (UAC) I've noted when UAC is on lots of commandline prompt items throw extremely generic errors such as "Access denied" without further explanation - even if you're logged in as administrator.

I think this was in the WAIK Release notes, I apologize I don't remember exactly where I read it but I think there's currently a known bug with Network Location not functioning if SkipMachineOOBE = true in your autounattend.xml file. Update: Found the forum thread over on Technet: http://forums.microsoft.com/TechNet/ShowPo...6&SiteID=17 Scroll down until you see the post from Bilal Aslam

Sysprep is starting to drive me insane. Heres my issue: I have two partitions - and I've tested this with Primary/Primary, and Primary/Logical. Primary/Logical I had Vista installed into the Logical partition. Setup runs fine, and after running sysprep /generalize /oobe I reboot and get this message: "The system registry contains invalid file paths. Installation cannot proceed. This system image was applied without guaranteeing that drive-letter assignments would match across computers." Clicking Ok causes a reboot and the message repeats .. Anyone seen this? Does Vista have to be installed to the Primary partition, and I can only have one primary partition?