pcombs

IcemanND-- I went into the Local Security policy as suggested and changed the account name to Administrator (after renaming the admin account I'd created Adm to eliminate confusion). After a reboot the machine still defaults to WSUadm as the login user. I searched the registry to find WSUadm and turned up blank. ScottyUK30-- Did as you suggested. The top box you mention is already unchecked. All the other option buttons (add/remove/properties/reset password) are greyed out. I'm thinking I may just say the hell with it and blow the machine away and reinstall from scratch as I should have. Lesson learned: Don't take shortcuts to save time, you'll only get burned.

Of course you cannot replace one admin by an other. Do you not have the password for that first Admin ? Do you not work with those people ? Sure, we have the password. We just don't want them monkeying around with our machines/setups. (Mostly a political situation, but there are a few people there who simply don't know what they're doing.) Besides, we really want our Admin account login 'Administrator,' so their version isn't acceptable.

I'll try to make this short...my school's main IT department makes an XP image that's put on all new incoming machines. Our department does our own thing and usually installs from scratch. This time I decided to save some time (!) and use their install as a base, deleting the apps we don't use and tailoring the incidentals to our liking. However, one aspect of their install will not die: they created an Administrator account with a different name (wsuadm) and made that account the default login user. I created my own admin account, set up the image, then attempted to delete their account. XP won't let me (can't delete built-in accounts). I disabled it instead, and in my Sysprep config file have my Administrator account set as the default login account. After a sysprep the machine defaults back to the wsuadm user for login. I've opened the registry, gone to HKLM|Software|Microsoft|WindowsNT|CurrentVersion|WinLogon and found the DefaultUserName key set to wsuadm. I change it to Administrator, verify that AltDefaultUserName is also Administrator, then exit regedit and do a sysprep. After the machine is restarted, wsuadm is back as the DefaultUserName. Obviously this is getting rewritten from somewhere, but where?

I'll PM you...this seems more complex than I'd like to duplicate, but I'd like to experiment with it. I was just looking at an image in Ghost Explorer, thinking I might be able to make my image then simply substitute the appropriate HAL file directly into the image file. I can export any file I want from an image, but as for copying a new one in...seems Ghost Explorer won't allow me to edit an NTFS or "Image All" -type image. Grr...

Hello! I'm new to the forums and your site. I've read your docs about unattended installs, as I'm looking for a more efficient way to image my machines. Some of the info appears to be what I'd read when I first started using Sysprep. However, I'm not sure that the unattended installation info and methods you describe will solve my problem, so let me explain what I need and perhaps someone can clarify things for me... I have four different flavors of Pentium 4 machines, all Intel mobos but with different HALs (Hardware Abstraction Layers). Exactly what that involves I don't know, except that a Ghost image created on one machine blows up when it's loaded on one of the others. Rather than updating four separate images, I'd like one "Universal XP Installation Image" that is created on a master machine, with all my settings/installed software intact. I would create my Ghost image after using Sysprep and, after the image is blown down to one of the other PCs, Windows would find and load the proper hardware drivers for that motherboard as it put its face back on. I'd read on another forum sometime last year that one enterprising person had managed to do that using brute force. He'd gone into the registry on his master machine and deleted all the hardware-specific entries under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE before imaging his machine. He'd also put mobo drivers into an $OEM$ directory he'd created and Windows was able to sort things out. Unfortunately I cannot find the posting (and the user wasn't too keen on writing up detailed information on what he'd done, anyway). So, obviously this is possible. Has anyone else done this, and, if so, could you share some tips?