Run Sysprep on an Image
3/21/2011
Sysprep is a tool that helps you prepare a device for imaging or for end-user delivery. Running Sysprep is necessary a necessary part of many deployment and servicing tasks, such as capturing an image or preparing a device for an end-user. Usually, you will use Sysprep to accomplish the following:
- Remove device and user-specific information from a deployment with the /generalize option. This is necessary if you plan on imaging a device and redeploying the Windows Embedded Standard 7 instance on multiple devices.
- Reboot a device in Audit mode. Audit mode allows you to skip the Windows Welcome startup, enabling you to customize or test an image prior to delivering it to an end-user.
- Reboot a device in Windows Welcome (also known as the Out-of-Box Experience) Windows Welcome allows a user to configure setting such as language, time-zone and logon.
Important
If you are planning on deploying an image to a new device, you must run sysprep /generalize, even if the device has the same hardware configuration. The sysprep /generalize command removes unique information from your Standard 7 installation, which enables you to reuse that image on different devices. The next time you boot the Standard 7 image, the specialize configuration pass runs. During this configuration pass, many components have actions that must be processed when you boot a Standard 7 image on a new computer. Moving or copying a Windows image to a different computer without running sysprep /generalize is not supported.
Hardware and Software Assumptions
- You have installed Windows Embedded Standard 7 on a device that meets the Requirements for an Embedded Device
Key Concepts and Technologies
This guide assumes you have a basic familiarity with Sysprep. For more information, see Sysprep Technical Reference.
Removing device and user-specific information from an image
On a Standard 7 image, run the following command. This will remove all device and user-specific information from the image, and shutdown the device. One the image restarts it will start in audit mode.
sysprep /generalize /audit /shutdownAlternatively, you can restart the image in Windows Welcome with the following command. You will do this, for example, if you wish to deploy the image directly to an end-user without any additional testing or configuration once the image has been redeployed.
sysprep /generalize /oobe /shutdownYou can now use this image as a reference image that can be deployed to other devices. For information on how to capture this image and redeploy it, see Capture an Image and Deploying Images.
Preparing a Device for an End-User
Before providing a device to an end-user, you should remove all user-specific information from the Standard 7 installation and setup the installation to boot into Windows Welcome so that a user can configure their settings. The following Sysprep command will remove user-specific information and prepare the installation to boot into Windows Welcome.
sysprep /generalize /oobe /shutdown