Do I need to Sysprep Windows 7?

Question

Let's say I have one image and I want to put the same image on many identical Lenovo laptops. These new laptops have site licenses (Office 2010, Windows 7).

My questions:

1. What software do you recommend for this project? e.g Acronis True Image, Clonezilla, MDT

2. How do I take the image? after the Windows 7 and Office 2010 activation processes or before?

I'm very confused. e.g.: by many websites saying "you must Sysprep when deploying a Windows 7 machine." Is this correct, and if so why?

Answer 1

Ill answer some of your questions.

1. While method for cloning is quite subjective, I prefer MDT, because when I want to update the image (add OS patches, upgrade software or support more hardware) I can simply do that in the tool.

2. Yes, you need to sysprep. All other ways are unsupported by Microsoft. Most important thing that does is resetting the unique OS identifier (SID) so multiple machines are not seen as the same on the network.

3. I believe the sysprep removes the activation anyway, so Id do it before, if I didnt use MDT, in which case the question is kind of moot.

Answer 2

Windows has a SID which is supposed to be unique for every PC. Sysprep does a number of things but it generates a new unique SID. A unique SID is especially important for active directories if you have one.

Windows 7 and Office should be activated. On our network we use a KMS licensing server which handles all the activations.

DRBL actually uses clonezilla internally but has a better interface. I use drbl from drbl.sourceforge.net You can download a live CD and boot any PC from it.

I like the fact it supports network booting. Once the server is booted and configured you first capture the image. Then set it up to multicast to all the other computers in the room.

Boot all the other PC's with network boot and when you either reach the number of computers or amount of time you configured on the server they will all image at once.

Answer 3

Just to clarify, the truth is that cloning is officially supported by Microsoft only if you use Sysprep, but there may be numerous reasons you want to avoid this.

That the SID must be unique is a myth; you can read a lot of articles about it, but the truth is that Windows never reveals its internal SID, not even to the domain-controller in an Active Directory environment.

A new SID is generated when you join Active Directory. I’ve been testing this scenario in a few networks I manage, and I’ve never come across any issues caused by not using Sysprep. The only thing that needed to be resolved was generating new a ID for WSUS, and this was solved by pushing out a GPO with one registry key.

You still need to rename your machines and join them to a domain, but you can do this manually or use a tool like Auto rename & Active Directory join tool.

In summary, no, you don’t have to use Sysprep if you don’t want to; there are no consequences other than the aforementioned ones that can be worked around.