Sysprep Troubles in Windows 7
Today I began the long journey of developing a deployment image of Windows 7. Before I started installing all the standard software that my organization uses I decided to test out the new version of sysprep. So I created an “autounattend.xml” file, it automatically installed then booted a fresh install of windows 7 into sysprep audit mode. I decided I would install Microsoft Office as a test then generalize and reseal sysprep. After clicking the button to begin sysprep I got a nice little box saying sysprep was starting. Then out of no where *beep*, and I see a warning message from sysprep that a fatal error has occurred. At this point I decided to restart in hopes it would reenter audit mode, instead it no longer would boot.
After googling the error, I discovered a lot of people were having this issue and I also soon found the problem, Windows Media Player. I really can’t understand why Microsoft is infesting its media playing software into a fresh install of the OS. If you remember in the past WMP in a early leak of Windows 7 caused music files to be scanned and to have a small amount of data added to the beginning of these files, corrupting them. Now they have processes from this software, running and scanning your files even from a clean install without ever opening the program. Further they missed that it would cause difficulties with sysprep, and now I have to kill these processes or disable them from services, in order to get sysprep to function correctly.
