Sysprep does not always parse mass storage drivers

[passmaster16]

I've always noticed this odd behavior with Sysprep for XP SP2. It seems that every other time I run Sysprep on my build image, it will alternate between shutting down very quickly (usually within a minute) vs taking a long time (20-30 minutes) to shut down. The behavior is actually documented on this http://www.vernalex.com/guides/sysprep/issues.shtml#drivers website.

I am pretty certain that this is due to the fact that Sysprep is not parasing the SysprepMassStorage section of the Sysprep.inf file when these quick shutdowns occur. The issue never seemed to adversely affect my machines until I added the new Intel Sata drivers for new hardware we were getting in. After adding the new drivers and running Sysprep, my build machine did a quick shutdown. Upon restart, the Sata drivers did not install on my new hardware, and the system went into a reboot loop. I proceeded to go back and run Sysprep again, this time it took about 20 minutes to shut down. This resulted in a successful load of the image on my new hardware.

Is this a known issue with Sysprep? Is there any way to force it to parse the Mass Storage section every time? One of the suggestions listed on the website above mentioned keeping a "gold" image and Sysprep it to create a "final" build. This would not be ideal as I have already run Sysprep on my final images so I'd have to rebuild them from scratch to have clean, non-sysprepped images available. For now I've been simply watching the Sysprep process, and if the machine shuts down too quick, I just reboot it, log in and run Sysprep again. This usually results in the proper parsing of the Mass Storage drivers. It's a bit Inconvenient though so I'd like to know of a way to force the parsing every time.

I'm running sysprep -mini -reaseal

A sample of my Sysprep.inf file is below

;SetupMgrTag

[unattended]

OEMSkipEula=Yes

UpdateInstalledDrivers=yes

DriverSigningPolicy=Ignore

OEMPnpDriversPath="\i386\$oem$00_chipset; removed remaining drivers"

[GuiUnattended]

AdminPassword="password"

EncryptedAdminPassword=NO

OEMSkipRegional=1

OemSkipWelcome=1

OEMDuplicatorString=

[userData]

ProductKey=XXXX

FullName="User"

OrgName="name"

ComputerName=

[Display]

BitsPerPel=32

Xresolution=1024

YResolution=768

[GuiRunOnce]

[identification]

JoinWorkgroup=WINXP

[Networking]

InstallDefaultComponents=Yes

[sysprepMassStorage]

*pnp0a00=c:\windows\inf\machine.inf

*pnp0a01=c:\windows\inf\machine.inf

removed remaining drivers

[passmaster16]

I just realized I should have posted this in the Unattended forum. Mods feel free move this. Thanks!

[IcemanND]

MOVED.

You are missing a section in your sysprep file to have it process the mass storage controllers.

Put this before [sysprepmassstorage]:

[sysprep]

BuildMassStorageSection = Yes

[passmaster16]

MOVED.

You are missing a section in your sysprep file to have it process the mass storage controllers.

Put this before [sysprepmassstorage]:

[sysprep]

BuildMassStorageSection = Yes

Thanks. I was under the impression that BuildMassStorageSection is used to simply populate the SysprepMassStorage section of Sysprep.inf. Since I already populated SysprepMassStorage using sysprep -bmsd, I did not think BuildMassStorageSection was required. Doesn't Sysprep see that there is a SysprepMassStorage section and parse those drivers automatically?

According to the deployment guide

You can run the command Sysprep -bmsd instead of including the BuildMassStorageSection entry in your Sysprep.inf file. When you run the command Sysprep -bmsd, Sysprep populates a pre-existing [sysprepMassStorage] section, but the mass-storage controllers are not installed until the next time you run Sysprep. You can then delete items from this section before running Sysprep -reseal or Sysprep -factory on this installation. Installing a smaller number of items in the critical device database reduces the time required for this image to restart into the operating system.