| 1 | <?xml version='1.0' encoding='UTF-8'?>
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| 2 | <!DOCTYPE topic PUBLIC "-//OASIS//DTD DITA Topic//EN" "topic.dtd">
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| 3 | <topic xml:lang="en-us" id="sysprep">
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| 4 | <title>Automated Windows System Preparation</title>
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| 5 |
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| 6 | <body>
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| 7 | <p>Microsoft offers a system preparation tool called Sysprep, to prepare a Windows system for deployment or
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| 8 | redistribution. Some Windows releases include Sysprep on the installation medium, but the tool is also available
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| 9 | for download from the Microsoft website. In a standard For most Windows versions, Sysprep is included in a default
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| 10 | installation. Sysprep mainly consists of an executable called <userinput>sysprep.exe</userinput> which is invoked
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| 11 | by the user to put the Windows installation into preparation mode. </p>
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| 12 | <p>The Guest Additions offer a way to launch a system preparation on the guest operating system in an automated way,
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| 13 | controlled from the host system. See <xref href="guestadd-guestcontrol.dita">Guest Control of Applications</xref>
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| 14 | for details of how to use this feature with the special identifier <codeph>sysprep</codeph> as the program to
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| 15 | execute, along with the user name <codeph>sysprep</codeph> and password <codeph>sysprep</codeph> for the
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| 16 | credentials. Sysprep is then started with the required system rights. </p>
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| 17 | <note>
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| 18 | <p>Specifying the location of <userinput>sysprep.exe</userinput> is <b outputclass="bold">not possible</b>.
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| 19 | Instead the following paths are used, based on the Windows release: </p>
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| 20 | <ul>
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| 21 | <li>
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| 22 | <p><filepath>C:\sysprep\sysprep.exe</filepath> for Windows XP
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| 23 | and earlier
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| 24 | </p>
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| 25 | </li>
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| 26 | <li>
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| 27 | <p><filepath>%WINDIR%\System32\sysprep\sysprep.exe</filepath>
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| 28 | for Windows Vista and later
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| 29 | </p>
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| 30 | </li>
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| 31 | </ul>
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| 32 | <p>The Guest Additions will automatically use the appropriate path to execute the system preparation tool. </p>
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| 33 | </note>
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| 34 | </body>
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| 35 |
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| 36 | </topic>
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