win 7 imaging and deploying

I’m in the process of cloning my Win 7 images. I understand the only official way to change SID’s and copy the configure profile to the default user is with sysprep. Does anyone have some good step by step references from start to finish. From using sysprep to make a zero touch installation, to deploying the image through wds and configuring each machine to come up with the correct name, join the domain, be placed in the correct OU, etc. Or does anyone use ghost?

I’ve gotten to the point of having an unnattend.xml file (still asking for the network location), and copying the installation with imagex to a hard drive. The problem is putting it back on the computer (missing ntldr error), and then eventually using wds to push the images (43 gigs in ghost and 22 gigs using imagex) to some 150 pc’s (for starters). The next step after is to get the images in a central repository and push them back out to the pc’s with zero touch.

Thank you for any help,


Mark’s Blog : The Machine SID Duplication Myth – http://blogs.technet.com/markrussinovich/archive/2009/11/03/3291024.aspx

Je Jin’s DISM Tool – http://forums.mydigitallife.info/threads/9682-Je-Jin-s-DISM-Tool


can’t help much because we’ve always added PC’s to the domain manually – whether using Ghost, BDD, or the Win7 System Image tool. We’ve just started using the new Altiris 7 and have been able to successfully image systems with XP, Vista and Win7. We’re still learning the interface but it seems fine so far.