4 ms·

It's the SID you were changing, and it turns out it was never actually required: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/windows-blog-archive/the-machine-sid-dup

by luma 4y ago

It's the SID you were changing, and it turns out it was never actually required: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/windows-blog-archive/the-machine-sid-duplication-myth-and-why-sysprep-matters/ba-p/723859 https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/windows-blog-archive/... Russinovich eventually pulled the tool from circulation.

magicalhippo 4y ago
Ah yes, that was it. I do recall we got error messages preventing the machine from working, and the guys spent some time researching before a solution was found. The error messages went away after changing the SID.
toyg 4y ago
There are some conspiracy theories, fuelled by the fact that Russinovich only pulled the tool after being acquihired by Microsoft. It's undeniable, in my experience, that the tool did help, despite all the swearing to the contrary. Making a leap from there to believing that it probably made it too easy to clone Windows machines in a way that Microsoft had no control on, and hence asked him to pull it, doesn't seem so crazy though.
- Godel_unicode 4y ago
  You just needed to actually read the documentation and use sysprep (ideally with an unattend file). Just remember to image it before sysprepping since you can only run it a few times. There are a ton of things sysprep does that are really helpful and not handled at all by tools like that. Microsoft doesn’t care if you clone systems, (why would they?) they care about the volume of help desk tickets created by doing it wrong.
  - toyg 4y ago
    > You just needed to actually read the documentation and use sysprep [...] There are a ton of things sysprep does that are really helpful And a lot that are not helpful, iirc. It was probably 10 years ago when I had to deal with this, but my recollection is that Sysprep was messing with a lot of stuff - more than I needed. > Microsoft doesn’t care if you clone systems, (why would they?) Lol, licenses, of course. Nowadays they got a bit softer on the issue, but back then they were still very very twitchy about duplicating and virtualizing systems.
    - Godel_unicode 4y ago
      We have very different memories, then. The official docs were really good as far back as 2006 or so, they just required you to actually read them. Sysprep was certainly a powerful tool, but if you told it not to generalize and no OoBE, it mostly just reset the SID. Most people I ran into who had issues were using some random poorly written blog posts that were really just content farming for ad money. Huh? I’ll grant you that Microsoft was picky about being paid for their software, but they produced a ton of tools to support cloning and duplicating. License compliance was handled with audits and CALs, not some weird cabal of anti-imaging.

by luma 4y ago

magicalhippo 4y ago

Ah yes, that was it. I do recall we got error messages preventing the machine from working, and the guys spent some time researching before a solution was found. The error messages went away after changing the SID.

toyg 4y ago

There are some conspiracy theories, fuelled by the fact that Russinovich only pulled the tool after being acquihired by Microsoft. It's undeniable, in my experience, that the tool did help, despite all the swearing to the contrary. Making a leap from there to believing that it probably made it too easy to clone Windows machines in a way that Microsoft had no control on, and hence asked him to pull it, doesn't seem so crazy though.

Godel_unicode 4y ago
You just needed to actually read the documentation and use sysprep (ideally with an unattend file). Just remember to image it before sysprepping since you can only run it a few times. There are a ton of things sysprep does that are really helpful and not handled at all by tools like that. Microsoft doesn’t care if you clone systems, (why would they?) they care about the volume of help desk tickets created by doing it wrong.
- toyg 4y ago
  > You just needed to actually read the documentation and use sysprep [...] There are a ton of things sysprep does that are really helpful And a lot that are not helpful, iirc. It was probably 10 years ago when I had to deal with this, but my recollection is that Sysprep was messing with a lot of stuff - more than I needed. > Microsoft doesn’t care if you clone systems, (why would they?) Lol, licenses, of course. Nowadays they got a bit softer on the issue, but back then they were still very very twitchy about duplicating and virtualizing systems.
  - Godel_unicode 4y ago
    We have very different memories, then. The official docs were really good as far back as 2006 or so, they just required you to actually read them. Sysprep was certainly a powerful tool, but if you told it not to generalize and no OoBE, it mostly just reset the SID. Most people I ran into who had issues were using some random poorly written blog posts that were really just content farming for ad money. Huh? I’ll grant you that Microsoft was picky about being paid for their software, but they produced a ton of tools to support cloning and duplicating. License compliance was handled with audits and CALs, not some weird cabal of anti-imaging.