Create a new user account in the Welcome screen, and when you log in, you should see all your customizations there. On reboot, Windows will run out of the box, as the /oobe is intended. After doing so, sysprep will delete/clean up the Administrator account, but if you have copyprofile=true in your unattended answerfile, it will copy the customized Admin account to the default profile before deleting it. You will be stuck in this audit mode until you run sysprep with the /oobe parameter. If you need to reboot, the computer will boot you back into the Administrator account.
Install any software/drivers, make any profile customizations, etc. A sysprep GUI box will appear, but you can close it and NOW begin to customize your profile.
On reboot, you'll automatically be logged in under the built-in Administrator account*. This will reboot your machine and put your windows build in 'audit' mode. The correct way to get sysprep to work with copyprofile=true is after you first install win7, when you arrive at the welcome screen and it asks you to create a username, hit ctrl+shift+f3. It will actually give you an error message, tell you to reboot the machine, and when you do so the error message reappears, leaving you in an endless cycle of rebooting.
First, it appears that you can't create a user account, customize it, and then run sysprep from that account with the copyprofile=true setting, as after sysprep reboots your machine, it will fail when it attempts to process your answerfile (when it reaches the copyprofile step). This is why I tried to get sysprep with the copyprofile = true setting to work. You could, of course, write a script to replace 'John' with 'whatever' but i've found many other places under HKEY_CURRENT_USER\* where old profile data/paths to 'John' would appear. Now when you create a new user account, say 'Mary', under her account in the registry path pasted above, the DWORD "AppData" will point to C:\Users\John\AppData\Roaming instead of the correct C:\Users\Mary\AppData\Roaming. Then you followed either a) or b) to overwrite the default profile.
So for example, suppose you started with a clean Windows 7 install, created the user 'John' and customized that profile. For new accounts that you create, you will find that all the words in "HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Shell Folders" will have user data based on the original user account you customized the default profile with.
I've spent some time trying to get a customized default profile set up in Windows and I've failed several times before finally getting it to work.įirst, a lot people/blogs suggest to create a new user account, customize it and do either one of the followingĪ) log in with the admin account and manually copy the customized user profile over the default user profile in C:\users\ī) Download a free 3rd party tool called Windows Enabler, which will allow you to use the greyed out "Copy to" button in User Profiles (in System Properties).īoth of these things do the same exact thing as far as I can tell and both lead to a big problem. This article is in response to Brian Jackson's blog posting: Sysprep a Windows 7 Machine – Start to Finish