Sysprep Magic
Plenty of information is available about using Sysprep with the imaging process for XP and Win2K, so I won't cover the fundamentals. (For an overview of the tool's capabilities and parameters, see "Deploying PCs with Sysprep," June 2002, http://www.winnetmag.com, InstantDoc ID 24877.) Instead, I discuss the Sysprep features that help make disk imaging a more useful large-scale deployment mechanism.
The most powerful functionality for stretching an image to fit different types of hardware is presented in the SysprepMassStorage section of sysprep.inf. You can manually add mass storage drivers to this section to enable systems with different disk controllers to share an image, or to hedge all bets, you can have Sysprep automatically populate this section with entries for every mass storage driver included with the OS.
The upside of the latter approach is that you can support a wider range of hardware with one image—even hardware that might not have existed in your company when you created the image. Unfortunately, it takes 10 to 15 minutes to include all the drivers during the Sysprep process, and you must provide a means for running Sysprep with the -clean option on target systems. The -clean operation, which you execute using the cmdlines.txt or GUIRunOnce methods discussed below, will prevent Windows from trying to load drivers for nonexistent mass storage controllers. To have Sysprep automatically add mass storage drivers, you must include both a Sysprep and SysprepMassStorage section in the sysprep.inf file. Create the following entry under the Sysprep section:
BuildMassStorageSection=Yes
as Listing 1 shows. To tell Sysprep to create the entries, open a command prompt, change to the directory where sysprep.exe is located, type
sysprep -bmsd
and press enter. The program will build the SysprepMassStorage section and finish silently. Then type
Sysprep -mini
to launch the final Sysprep operation. See "Deploying PCs with Sysprep" for information about other command options you can use to complete the image-building process. You can also use the standard Sysprep GUI to select the Reseal option to make final system preparations before taking an image.
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