Hello, Just found this great resource and am having a bit of an issue that I’m hoping some one can give me some insight on. I apologize for the long read but I will try to be as detailed as possible to make things easier to diagnose hopefully. My Needs: Being able to sysprep a custom universal Win7 64 Enterprise image, capture it by WDS, and then make it available for unattended deployment with wds. Due to the nature of images needing to be updated on a semi regular basis I can’t use the vanilla sysprep options within the OS since you only get 3 rearms before sysprep becomes impossible to run on that image ever again. If someone knows of an easy way to reset the rearm counters please let me know. This means in the OS sysprep process I pass it a custom unnatend.xml file that has the skiprearm command in it. This was the only way I’ve been able to make sure my custom image isn’t made unsyspreppable in the future. Again If there is a better way to do this let me know. So I installed WDS took an image I had configured to my liking, sysprepped, made it available and am able to deploy it just fine via WDS network boot. So far so good. I’m getting a large shipment of new PCs soon and decided it would be nice if I didn’t have to go through the mini setup for all of them (Language, Keyboard, Drive Formatting, Selecting the specific Image from WDS and so on) Went into WDS made sure to enable unattended installs for the server and the image and tried using 2 separate unattended files, one for the server one for the image. I started elaborate but then tried to scale it back since my files were either being ignored or causing the WDS deploy to fail. Often I would get unable to communicate to WDS server errors when trying to use the custom files. So then I went down to 1 file. Just the server file and just the setting that logs me into the WDS server so that I do not have to put in a username and password. I even set it to always hide the UI. I tried every password, username, domain formatting combo I could think of and it has not auto logged in once so far. The code for the server file is pasted below. I used the SIM tool to create the unattend file by pointing it at the source files of a Win 7 Ent DVD which is obviously not the exact same WIM file as my custom image but the same base. I have gone into the WDS event logs for WDS services and there are 0 errors and warnings. Windows firewall is not on for the Server. Ok that was long and I apologize Quick summary 1. Trying to deploy custom Win 7 Ent 64 wim 2. Using WDS 3. Must be able to sysprep many times thus am using SkipRearm in the sysprep process by passing a local unattend file in the sysprep process. Might not be the best way to facilitate this more than 3 syspreps needs am open to any suggestion. 4. Can deploy image just fine using WDS but must make Language, Keyboard, Image and Disk selections. 5. Want to make the whole process unattended so that all I’d have to do is hit f12 slect the deployment boot from WDS and have it be automated from there. 6. Tried varying/several unattend files for both the server and image level and none work or they all cause WDS to hang and then say that it could not connect to the WDS server. 7. Event logs on server show no warnings or errors. Ok that’s about it I think, Thank you soo much for anyone that can help in any way. This is the “simple” server side file I’ve been testing with. <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <unattend xmlns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:unattend"> <settings pass="windowsPE"> <component name="Microsoft-Windows-Setup" processorArchitecture="amd64" publicKeyToken="31bf3856ad364e35" language="neutral" versionScope="nonSxS" xmlns:wcm="http://schemas.microsoft.com/WMIConfig/2002/State" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"> <WindowsDeploymentServices> <Login> <WillShowUI>Never</WillShowUI> <Credentials> <Domain>domain.local</Domain> <Password>password1</Password> <Username>user1</Username> </Credentials> </Login> </WindowsDeploymentServices> </component> </settings> <cpi:offlineImage cpi:source="wim://hqfs01/tsuinstall/operatingsystems/win%207%20enterprise%20x64/extractedfiles/sources/install.wim#Windows 7 ENTERPRISE" xmlns:cpi="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:cpi" /> </unattend>
