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Sysprep Questions

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by eraser3498

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I have a computer that just recently died due to a defective motherboard. Is there anyway that I can run sysprep on the affected computer's hard drive from another PC's? I've tried using Bartpe and ran sysprep from in there but it says it can't find setupcl.exe. Its in the same directory as sysprep so I'm not sure of the problem there. If any has any ideas on how to fixc this and or another way of doing it your help is greatly appreciated. Thanks.

6 replies

by hal 9000

It really depends on what you want to do here if you are attempting to get this HDD to boot on another M'Board the best solution is to do an Inplace Install as this will load the correct drivers for the M'Board though you'll most likely have to reload any third party drivers like sound & Video, the directions for an Inplace install are here

http://tinyurl.com/g4bv8

If all you want to do is recover your data you'll most likely need to take Ownership of the files so follow the directions here

http://tinyurl.com/3aw7

And if you encrypted the files you'll also need to save the encryption key which can be done by following these directions

http://tinyurl.com/orpmf

I would recommend that you backup your data and Encryption Keys before doing any In Place Install as this will overwrite your Encryption Keys and your data will effectively be useless. You should be able to do this by using this HDD as a Slave or in a USB Caddy which would be my first option as they are easier to work with.

If you do perform an In Place Install it will overwrite your existing OS but will keep a working copy of all your software though you'll have to patch the system again and add any Service Packs that have been released since the original OS was installed.

Col

by eraser3498

I was trying to avoid doing a Windows XP repair and thought Sysprep would a good option to achive this by simple stripping out the driver information and preforming a minisetup all programs and setting should preserved. Doing a repair will destory most of the exsisting profiles and dat I want to keep. Is there anyway of doing this?

by cg it

Humm Sysprep with the corresponding answer file is for imagining and then deploying an O/S with associated drivers to a large # of same hardware machines. Least that is what the idea of sysprep is for. If you already have an O/S installed on a hard drive and the mother board goes bad, I would install a new motherboard, boot up, have the board driver disk ready and let the new hardware wizard install the necessary board drivers. You'll just have the old board drivers on the system but they don't take up enough space to worrry about.

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