Please Help - Symantec AV vs. Sysprep!

[pascalli2]

Hi,

I'm in a bit of a conundrum. We use Symantec Antivirus Corporate ediition for virus protection on our network. We also use sysprep to deploy machines. Recently, when working on creating some images, I discovered that images were no longer able to join the domain when going through the mini setup when they are first deployed. Instead of joining the domain as they should, I receive a "Invalid domain" error message. After several troubleshooting sessions and re-dos, I found that the source of my problem is apparently Symantec AntiVirus. Originally, we had been using version 8.0.1, and that was working fine. One of the changes I made on these images however, is upgrading to 9.0.2. It seems that there is something about the 9.0 series of Symantec that is causing the machines not to join the domain properly after going through sysprep. To verify, I uninstalled 9.0.2, and put 8.0.1 back on, and it seems to work fine. I have tried disabling the Symantec services before running Sysprep, but it seems impossible to get a machine that has 9.0 or above installed to join the domain after running sysprep. A potentially important note to this, however, is that once the mini setup following sysprep is done, and the machine is up, but not joined to the domain, I am easily able to add it to the domain. It just doesn't work during the setup session following sysprep. This is really frustrating, and I want to know if I'm the only one that has seen things like this happening? So, to summarize a few key points:

- Pertains to Windows 2000 Server, SP4 images I am creating

- We are running Symantec Antivirus Corporate Edition

- Version 9.0 and above do NOT work, 8.0.1 DOES work

- Using Sysprep Ver. 1.1

- Happens across multiple hardware platforms, including virtual PCs.

If anybody has any ideas about this, or questions, please let me know. Thanks so much!!!

[tguy]

I am going to assume that your servers are managed as opposed to unmanaged with Symantec Anti-Virus.

Have you tried renaming or removing the GRC.DAT file? This is the file that SAV uses to recognize it's parent server and get its updates from.

If you have not, give it a try and see if it works.

tguy

[pascalli2]

Hi, thanks for posting! I'm afraid they're not managed in this particular case...I'm actually trying to get some images for remote users that won't be on the network all too often. The install I'm using doesn't use a GRC.Dat file for any configurations.