Question

On thursday I am going to reinstall windows XP (64bit) on a customers machine. I was thinking of ways to speed this up and I came across sysprep System Preparation Tool and Answer File Usage. I was wondering if this would be the best way to go out a reinstall since I want to make it as fast as possible. Any suggestions?

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Bl8ckr0uter

Later tonight I am going to practice deployments on some vms.

RobertKaucher

On a single machine you don't need sysprep. Just use the disc and an answer file on floppy. At one time I did so many single jobs like this I kept a USB floppy drive and disk with an answer file on it in my tool kit.

Hyper-Me

Windows Server 2003 Workstation was such a pain in the butt OS

Bl8ckr0uter

Turns out all I needed to do was do a repair installation and it fixed the issue. Didn't even need to do a reinstall. Awesome.

[Deleted User]

Is it possible to include applications in an automated install of Windows XP? Maybe I am not understanding this properly but with Windows 7 you can use the ImageX tool to capture a reference computer with the applications preinstalled. Is there a way of doing this in XP or am I just confused? I didn't want to create a new thread or jack this thread but I think this a legitimate question along the same lines as the one that knwminus had.

kriscamaro68

Yes. The OS has to install first obviously but then you can automate the installation of software via answer files and .msi I believe. There is no way to have it install programs during the install of the actual OS that I know of. Lenovo laptops did this. When I restored my laptop back to factory defaults it installs the OS and then runs scripts that start installs of programs automatically and do silent installs of these programs. This was all done without me having to do anything other than wait for it all to finish. But at the same time I am sure it takes a lot of time to write the scripts that call the programs and answer files and put it all together to work with no user interaction.

xmalachi wrote: »

Is it possible to include applications in an automated install of Windows XP? Maybe I am not understanding this properly but with Windows 7 you can use the ImageX tool to capture a reference computer with the applications preinstalled. Is there a way of doing this in XP or am I just confused? I didn't want to create a new thread or jack this thread but I think this a legitimate question along the same lines as the one that knwminus had.

Hyper-Me

You are right Kris. There are ways of post-scripting application installs after the unattend install, but the scripts are generally more trouble than they are worth if you dont have very many machines to do. This goes back to the RIS days of doing deployment which, in my opinion, need to stay way back

[Deleted User]

Appreciate the responses guys. Alternatively, could I sysprep and then ghost it to get the applications in there?

kriscamaro68

If you want to do large deploys with separate keys than yes but using a mak key would be better cause then you don't need to sysprep and can just ghost it. If this is just for a home computer or a couple computers then sysprep won't be of much value as it strips the sid's and license key from the os that is currently installed. Also once you sysprep a machine that machine is no longer usable from what I remember and has to be re-imaged. Sysprep's only real value is deploying lots of machines with different licenses. Maybe hyper can correct this if I am wrong as he knows way more about MS tech than I do.

xmalachi wrote: »

Appreciate the responses guys. Alternatively, could I sysprep and then ghost it to get the applications in there?

[Deleted User]

It would be in a business environment so I believe I would need to sysprep. Thanks for all of your help and swift responses.

NightShade03

Have you looked at vLite:

vLite - Windows Vista configuration tool

or nLite:

nLite - Deployment Tool for the bootable Unattended Windows installation

You can automate full installs of XP and Vista (not sure if it works on Windows 7) and it even has support for post install applications. The only catch I have found over the years of using is that like most things not all installers work with the post installation process so some testing is involved.