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As many of you know, I'm doing a lot of projects related to system deployments. Sometimes it is servers, sometimes it's a workstations, sometimes it's both :).
Right now I've been working on a project where we are going to deploy Windows 2008 Servers in about 200 sites across Canada. As you can guess, this project also contains workstations and there are going to be Windows 7 Professional.
Since Microsoft released Windows Vista, the only supported way to "clone" windows systems become SYSPREP. Personally, I've been using sysprep since Windows NT 4, but there were other solutions that many professionals used to use.
So, as I said, I've been involved in a new deployment project :)...When we finished installing and customizing our Windows 7 system, I've executed a following command:
C:\Windows\System32\sysprep\sysprep.exe /generalize /oobe /shutdown /unattend:c:\Windows\System32\sysprep\SYSPREP-Win7.xml
Note: SYSPREP-Win7.xml file that I've prepared before.
When the system rebooted, I get the following error:
"Windows could not finish configuring the system. To attempt to resume configuration, restart the computer. Windows could not finish configuring the system. To attempt to resume configuration, restart the computer."
I spent a lot of hours on investigation this problem. I was readying a lot of documentation, blog posts, forums...but couldn't find a real solution. There were some posts that talked about antiviruses application, about bad hardware drivers, wrong configs,.....but a not real solution.
Finally, I have the SOLUTION to this problem. It's equally not a solution, it's a way how to find where the problem is. This solution will tell you exactly what registry key is causing your sysprep to fail, so then you don't have to install every programme one by one until you find the problem. In most cases this issue is caused by certain registry keys that are either:
- Larger than 8kb
- Set with incorrect permissions
- Corrupt in some way
In my case, it was a corrupted registry key, so it was impossible to tell what programme was doing it. At least now I know how to generate a log and know exactly what registry key has an error.
Follow the following steps to get the log you need to see:
When you see the error message, do the following:
- Push Shift+F10 to get to a command prompt
- Navigate to C:\Windows\Panther
- Find the Setup.etl file and find a way to copy this file off of the system (I copied it to the D:\ partition. I always have a second partition when I'm working on deployment projects)
- Copy the setup.etl file from the corrupted system to another computer that has Windows 7.
- Open a Command Prompt on the Windows 7 computer and navigate to the folder where you've stored a setup.etl file
- Type "tracerpt setup.etl -o logfile.csv"
- Close the command prompt and open up logfile.csv
- Look through the log file (In my case it was towards the end) for messages that say "Failed to process reg key or one of it's ...." . Search for "reg key" or "failed to process" and you should find the failure.
- Remove this software from your image, or find out how to get the registry key that is failing to work properly.
By following those steps, I've managed to build a good Syspreped image.
I hope this solution will save a lot of time for somebody :)))
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