Questions about Windows 7 Pre-Activation.

[Spork Schivago]

Re: Questions about Windows 7 Pre-Activation.

Yeah, the customer is flexable and if I cannot get the recovery partition, he's okay with it. I like the challenge but I'm struggling with the whole BCDEdit stuff.

The idea was to have a master image that I can slipstream drivers to for individual machines. It's fully updated. I have that now. A way to boot to WinPE via network. I have that now.

A thumb drive for the customer that wipes the drive and setups Windows plus a recovery partition. I have that.

Configuring the recovery partition is where I'm struggling at though. I know how to set it where, during POST, the user hits F10, it's supposed to boot into recovery. The only problem is configuring the BCD store or whatever it's called so it looks for the winre.wim and install.wim stuff on the recovery partition, not the OS partition. He said if all I can do is the thumb drive, he's okay with that.

It would be nice to learn how to do the recovery partition stuff, even if most users won't use it. It'd be great experience I think. I'm all about learning and love a challenge.

[brethin]

Re: Questions about Windows 7 Pre-Activation.

I never use or keep a recovery partition because if the drive fails its worthless. A recovery CD / DVD is the best way to go. Or recovery USB if the machine has no CD / DVD drive.

[Spork Schivago]

Re: Questions about Windows 7 Pre-Activation.

You don't want it wiping the recovery partition, just the Windows one.
No, recovery partitions are a waste of time so not something i've investigated doing.

Right, I don't want it wiping the recovery partition. I just can't seem to find a way using an answer file to get it to just wipe the Windows partitions. I can only find the option to either wipe the whole drive or leave the drive intact. If I leave it in tact, the partitions stay. Thanks for all the help. I think for the recovery stuff, I'll try technet.

The customer wants a recovery partition. He brought a thumb drive down and wants a recovery thumb drive as well. That shouldn't be too hard, or at least if I didn't have to worry about the whole recovery partition part.

[diif]

Re: Questions about Windows 7 Pre-Activation.

You don't want it wiping the recovery partition, just the Windows one.
No, recovery partitions are a waste of time so not something i've investigated doing.

[Spork Schivago]

Re: Questions about Windows 7 Pre-Activation.

There are more options concerning partitions than that. The partition stuff along with all the other settings go in the answer file.

Okay. Right now, I have the answer file wiping the disk and creating three partitions
Recovery - 15,000MB typeID 0x27
System Reserved - 500MB typeID 0x7
Windows 7 Pro OS Part - the rest of the space typeID 0x7

If I could find away to just delete the partitions and create them instead of wiping the whole drive, that way, my recovery partition stays intact, it'd be great.

Also, I can't really find any good articles on how to create a recovery partition. You wouldn't happen to know of any good ones that doesn't require third party programs, would you?

[diif]

Re: Questions about Windows 7 Pre-Activation.

There are more options concerning partitions than that. The partition stuff along with all the other settings go in the answer file.

[Spork Schivago]

Re: Questions about Windows 7 Pre-Activation.

I don't think the answer file will help with the partition stuff. From what I see, I can either wipe the whole disk or not. If I wipe the whole disk, I lose the recovery partition. The example Microsoft gives, the show using SIM, you set the recovery partition to type 0x27. Maybe Windows is smart enough where it will create the recovery partition automatically for me?

[Spork Schivago]

Re: Questions about Windows 7 Pre-Activation.

Thank you Diif. I actually found that and that's what brought up my question. I saw this:

An answer file is an XML-based file that contains setting definitions and values to use during Windows Setup.

I was a bit confused because I wasn't sure if when I'm deploying a custom image, are we actually running Windows Setup or not? However, I think I found my answer! I used the SIM from WAIK to generate my answer file and passed it to sysprep to disable the rearm stuff. Then, for the second time, I reenabled the rearm stuff as per Microsoft's TechNet's article suggestion. I'm now capturing the image.

I noticed my unattend.xml file got copied to the c:\windows\Panther folder. I think when I deploy the image, that file will be read. I know I can mount these wim's and I'm thinking once I capture it, I should work on setting up the partition stuff in the answer file. I want it so the whole hard drive (minus the system reserve partition) is being used for Windows, and then I want to shrink that partition by something like 8GB (whatever the size of the wim is) for the recovery partition. I bet there's away to automate this so when I deploy the image via a tftp server, not only does it install, but it fully setups the recovery partition as well. That'd be real cool. Slipstream some drivers, deploy the image, have it setup the recovery partition, etc.

Thanks for all the help! I'm capturing my first image right now and boy am I excited!!!! Once I'm done though, I'm going to try deploying the image via the network on the same PC. Then I'm going to try and run sysprep again, but this time, keep the various drivers, so I can make the guy's actual recover partition. This image here is just the master image for all PCs.

[diif]

Re: Questions about Windows 7 Pre-Activation.

This should explain it better Spork.
https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/...=ws.10%29.aspx

[Spork Schivago]

Re: Questions about Windows 7 Pre-Activation.

Okay, so I fully updated the PC again and I'm getting ready to run sysprep. However, I want to disable rearm until my final run of SysPrep. I know how to do this. I have another question though. I'm creating the answer file right now, using the Windows 7 Professional .CLG file (or whatever it is) from the installation media. From what I've read, I copy this unattend.xml file to the sysprep directory and pass it to sysprep. I know how to do that. My question is this:

Is this unattend.xml file that I'm passing to sysprep going to be used when I deploy the image I capture? Does sysprep store it somewheres in the image? Essentially, should I be doing the partition stuff here? Thanks!

[diif]

Re: Questions about Windows 7 Pre-Activation.

There are a few different ways to make and deploy an image, you could probably boot from a USB rather than use a server.

[Spork Schivago]

Re: Questions about Windows 7 Pre-Activation.

Man, I think I'm going to have to use 3rd party tools to deploy the image over the network. I'm not part of a domain. I'm thinking of trying to setup that tftp32 or whatever it is. But from what I've read, I don't think I can do this through our router. I think I'll have to unhook my wife's machine from the network and connect her PC and the target machine via a cross-over ethernet cable. Then the tftp server includes some DHCP server and will assign an IP address. I don't see why I really need the cross-over cable though. I don't see why I need to take my router out of the equation, but according to some posts I've read, I need to.

[Spork Schivago]

Re: Questions about Windows 7 Pre-Activation.

For the network deployment, do you use a tftp server? I've read (just skimmed right now) that I might be able to use the Microsoft Deployment Toolkit to do this. I'd like to stick with official Microsoft programs for the time being and deploy from my wife's PC. Eventually, I'll setup a technician PC just for the Microsoft stuff and maybe a GNU C / C++ compiler or something.

[Spork Schivago]

Re: Questions about Windows 7 Pre-Activation.

Happy to help, it's been a while and we didn't do partitions but i do remember the option being there in WAIK.
Recovery partitions are left intact. You would just extract and install the Windows partition.

Okay. Because I want the recovery partition setup. I'm making two images that I'm going to capture with ImageX. The first is the master image that will be used to install 7 on many PCs. The other one will have drivers for this specific machine and will be copied to the recovery partition. The master image, I don't really care about the partitions. I'll set them up manually, but for the recovery partition, I need to figure out how to automate the partition deletion / creation, so the user doesn't have to mess with it. Hopefully the tool in WAIK is the solution.

Thanks!

[diif]

Re: Questions about Windows 7 Pre-Activation.

Happy to help, it's been a while and we didn't do partitions but i do remember the option being there in WAIK.
Recovery partitions are left intact. You would just extract and install the Windows partition.

[Spork Schivago]

Re: Questions about Windows 7 Pre-Activation.

Okay, I got the SkipRearm thing taken care of by creating an unattent.xml that I pass to sysprep. I just have to make sure the last time I run sysprep, I change the SkipRearm back to 0.

So, I'm using System Image Manager from WAIK. For my answer file, where it deletes the old partitions, formats, sets up the new ones, etc, I can use that with the image that I'm going to capture right? Or is that just for when I install 7? Thanks!

[Spork Schivago]

Re: Questions about Windows 7 Pre-Activation.

On a Technet article about sysprep, I see this:

If you anticipate running Sysprep multiple times on a single computer, you must use the SkipRearm setting in the Microsoft-Windows-Security-Licensing-SLC component to postpone resetting the activation clock. Because you can reset the activation clock only three times, if you run Sysprep multiple times on a computer, you might run out of activation clock resets. Microsoft recommends that you use the SkipRearm setting if you plan on running Sysprep multiple times on a computer.

I'm going to look into this Microsoft-Windows-Security-Licensing-SLC component and see how to set SkipRearm. I know there's a registry key called SkipRearm but I don't think that's how I properly set it.

[Spork Schivago]

Re: Questions about Windows 7 Pre-Activation.

The partition size/s and details are set using WAIK. It's one of the tools used to create the unattend answer file.

I wasn't going to use an unattended answer file. Is one absolutely required? Hopefully, if I have to use one for the partitions, I can set it up in such away where it deletes the System Reserve partition and the partition containing Windows and then recreates the System Reserve partition and the OS partition where the OS partition uses all the available free space. That way, if a different PC has a different size hard drive, I don't have to create special unattended answer files for each system.

Thanks for all the help Diif. You've been really helpful here and being the first time I've done this, I'm sure to someone who's done it a lot, my questions are pretty simple. I really appreciate your help.

[Spork Schivago]

Re: Questions about Windows 7 Pre-Activation.

So, if I enter a product key and pre-activate, and then run sysprep, do everything, but before I shutdown and boot off the USB thumb drive to capture the image, I remove the product key and cert using slmgr.vbs, would this allow me to run sysprep as many times as I want on that image?

Isn't the reason sysprep fails after running it three times is because each time, it takes the rearm counts and subtracts one? If it's activated, would it not matter? Thanks!

[diif]

Re: Questions about Windows 7 Pre-Activation.

The partition size/s and details are set using WAIK. It's one of the tools used to create the unattend answer file.