Sysprep

[tosca925]

I have a pc that contains loads of installed programs etc that have been built up over a long time. It is a AMD2100 512 ram. I want to upgrade to a P4.

If i sysprep the drive and then put it in the P4 pc will the sysprep method work? after i have installed the necessary drivers after boot up.

[ChrisH]

You can get away with this sometimes. I think the major deciding factor is the mass storage devices. These have to be similar and if your going from an AMD based system to an Intel I would say probably not.
I tried something similar recently as when I got to loading windows it BSOd on me. I heard you could get past this by running a repair but it didnt work.

[Dos_Box]

XP is quite good at fixing itself. After copying your drive to a safe location (ensure you have a slipstreamed XP SP2 disk for the next step), swap the drive into your new board, and boot from CD. Windows will find the current installation and ask if you want to repair it. Select yes. It wil then run through the installation process using reference drivers (hopefully).

[Netman]

You should be able to get away with it...
If it BSOD's on you on first boot, then boot from the WinXP CD, when it asks if you want to install or repair (recovery console), choose install. F8 for the licence agrrement and it should find your windows installation. This is where you are offered another 'repair' option - this is the one you want.. select this and let it go through Windows setup - part of which will be a full pnp enumeration which should do the trick...
Have used this many times to copy an XP install to different hardware and it's always worked so far. If you don't even get as far as BSOD (eg. it hangs at BIOS) then you need to enter the recovery console and run fixboot and/or fixmbr before following the instructions above...

I have also found that sysprep does the trick nearly all the time too... just add this:
[Sysprep]
BuildMassStorageSection = Yes
[SysprepMassStorage]
to the sysprep.inf file and make sure you tick the mini-setup option when you run sysprep...

[andy]

XP is quite good at fixing itself.

Agreed

Don't think Sysprep will help here - it strips out security info, not driver.

Andy

[tosca925]

Cheers Guys, I think i will do a Ghost image of my drive onto another drive first then try your suggestions.

[Netman]

@andy
Hence the command to rebuild the mass storage devices in the sysprep.inf file. Used with the mini-setup option in sysprep this forces windows to install the correct drivers for the changed hardware - as ChrisH rightly pointed out this is the usual reason that trying to move an XP installation to new hardware fails...

The best way is to run sysprep as discussed, image or move hdd to new machine, boot and see if you're there. If not, then follow the steps to repair as in dos_box and my post above... I have used the sysprep method to image an XP install to three different machines in the last few weeks and it booted first time on all... (Celeron 2.6, AMD 2200, Celeron 1100)...

[thom]

Could you please tell me the command line you use for running sysprep in this instance?
Is it something like
C:\Sysprep\sysprep.exe -mini -quiet -bmsd -activated
And can you clarify what each of the switches are going to do.
Thanks!

[Gatt]

Slightly O/T but i got an odd sysprep problem
Trying to use Ghost 8's Console to create an image of an XP/SP2 machine
when i execute the task, it starts ok , can see the box on the xp client, but when it tries to copy Sysprep over it fauls saying that sysprep version isnt correct

Am using the sysprep from the Win2k3 SP1 deploy cab, and also tried d/l one for XP from M$ but still cant get it to work..

What am i doing wrong?

[eejit]

Slightly O/T but i got an odd sysprep problem
Trying to use Ghost 8's Console to create an image of an XP/SP2 machine
when i execute the task, it starts ok , can see the box on the xp client, but when it tries to copy Sysprep over it fauls saying that sysprep version isnt correct

Am using the sysprep from the Win2k3 SP1 deploy cab, and also tried d/l one for XP from M$ but still cant get it to work..

What am i doing wrong?

This may not help you, but when using ghost you cannot have a copy of sysprep at c:\sysprep on the machine you want to create an imge from because that is where ghost copies it's version. It won't overwrite the other one for some reason. Worth looking at.

A second issue may be that the sysprep.inf does not match the sysprep.exe that you have. Did you create a new sysprep.inf by using setupmgr.exe?

[Gatt]

A second issue may be that the sysprep.inf does not match the sysprep.exe that you have. Did you create a new sysprep.inf by using setupmgr.exe?

The sysprep.inf file was created using the win2k3 version of sysprep, but that is worth a check when i get back after easter..

[thom]

So does anyone know about the switches to use, or the tick boxes to check? The sysprep /? info isn't very useful so if someone has some knowledge of which ones should be used on a system then that would be great.

[Michael]

Another method to try (as well as using sysprep) is to delete as many devices as you can from Device Manager, then shutdown the PC. XP will then be forced to re-detect hardware. This isn't guaranteed to work. I have managed to successfully do this with a Celeron 1.2GHz and another system with a Pentium 4 1.6GHz on different motherboards.

I've never tried an Intel > AMD or AMD > Intel migration. It will most probably get very messy so be sure to back-up!

[thom]

Wouldn't that be the same as using the -pnp switch?

[tarquel]

Am using the sysprep from the Win2k3 SP1 deploy cab, and also tried d/l one for XP from M$ but still cant get it to work..

Have you searched / looked at the .chm / help files inside the deploy cab?

It "should" detail everything for you there.

This may not help you, but when using ghost you cannot have a copy of sysprep at c:\sysprep on the machine you want to create an imge from because that is where ghost copies it's version. It won't overwrite the other one for some reason. Worth looking at.

Sysprep has always worked fine for me using ghost and sysprep. Perhaps there is more than one way to create a ghost image hehe but its fine if you create a image by "resealing" it and shutting down, using ghost boot disc to ghostcast a image to the server, and then deploy it back [using ghostcasting again] is how I've done it in the past.

Always worked fine with me.

HTH
Nath.