windows XP and sysprep

[ViviTheMage]

I have an image for windows XP SP 2 that works great, but when I plug in any USB drive, it does not auto detect. I have to go to device manager and update it manually.

I checked event log and it said its in Factory mode, which is what I sysprep'd it as...is there anyway to remove it from 'factory mode'?

 

[Smilin]

This may help...

How to manually knock a pc out of sysprep..

287506 How to Disable Mini-Setup Wizard on a Computer on Which You Used Sysprep
http://support.microsoft.com/d...x?scid=kb;EN-US;287506

 

[ViviTheMage]

Technically, couldn't I just rerun sysprep...as that looks like all I am doing to the registry.

 

[ViviTheMage]

Some sleuthing, in the registry go to -- HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE->SYSTEM>SETUP>

There is a key called FactoryPreloadInProgress, here it was set to 1, just set it to 0 and PnP and everything else works peachy.

 

[Smilin]

Originally posted by: ViviTheMage
Technically, couldn't I just rerun sysprep...as that looks like all I am doing to the registry.

Yeah. I kinda assumed you tried that before posting though. 🙂

 

[ViviTheMage]

Originally posted by: Smilin

Originally posted by: ViviTheMage
Technically, couldn't I just rerun sysprep...as that looks like all I am doing to the registry.

Yeah. I kinda assumed you tried that before posting though. 🙂

psssh, I did with no luck.

But my little registry fix worked out.

 

[Smilin]

So related story that might have a glimmer of interesting..

I spent many days as the support guy specializing in fixing "dead" servers and there was this one trick way down near the bottom of the bag that we would use when things were looking bad.

Take a non-bootable server and run an inplace upgrade (repair) on it. Text mode setup completes, server reboots and gui setup starts. During the gui mode portion of setup you'll pass through hardware detection and Windows setup will pause at a particular screen and ask for some input...time zone or something. At this pause, hit Shift-F10 to bring up a command prompt right there in the middle of setup. Run regedit and manually knock the server out of minisetup. When done, hard reset the server instead of letting setup complete.

What this does: hardware detection completes and writes boot-essential portions of the system hive. The software hive remains essentially unchanged like in any inplace upgrade but the premature break from setup doesn't allow the non-hardware portions of system to get wiped.

When it worked it was the most amazing server recovery kung-fu you've ever seen. I got about 50/50 out of the method but the servers I worked on were pretty damn unhealthy and this was about 10 steps beyond a "big copy" (I'll tell that trick another time).