Sysprep, Virtual PC's best friend

I discovered Sysprep recently while discussing with some Virtual PC product team members at the MVP Summit.  Basically I wanted to install and set one XP virtual machine and use it multiple times.  The problem is when you need to run two virtual machines at the same time; they have the same name.

Once you have created, installed, configured to your heart one virtual machine, you run Sysprep to "reseal" the image.  The next time you run the virtual machine, it will ask for the product key, machine name and network info but all the apps that you installed before running Sysprep will still be installed.  Cool !

Sysprep.exe can be found on the XP CD in the \Support\Tools\Deploy.cab file.  You also need to extract Setupcl.exe.

3 Comments

  • I never thought to use Sysprep with Virtual PC. Excellent tip!

  • And, if you're slick, You can use setupmanager (in the deploy.cab) and notepad to write an asnwer file. Put the sysprep.inf in your sysprep folder along with sysprep.exe and setupcl.exe, and you can automate minisetup. You'll get a radnom computer name, but you can change that later. You could also leave the ComputerName key out of the inf file and get prompted for that part.

  • I run Windows 2003 Server on the Virtual PC.



    When I run sysprep an error Message occurred:



    "The program and the current operating system are not the same - the process could not be continued"



    I really use the right version of SysPrep.



    Have anyone of you a idea?



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