Hi All I was stupid and installed a retail copy of windows XP in a VM, got it just the way I wanted, setup the Sysprep.inf and ran Sysprep. when that was done I took a snapshot and booted for the “first time” and during OOBE I get prompted for a CD Key (I entered it in Setup Manager during the preparation) see below: is this behavior to be expected when using Retail XP disc? what went up in smoke? in my collection I have all service packs of Home, Pro, and DME. within this collection I have retail, VLK, and OEM versions. I’m curious why on earth would they include the sysprep features in retail windows disc (you’d think someone eho’s an enthusiast would build a new machine, set it up, and image the sucker for easy restore. seriously… what gives?
Can you send the ISO (or something that leads to the ISO on Google)? This looks pretty interesting, I've never seen this screen before.
If you skip product key during setup, then it's normal. If you have not added product key to oobeinfo.ini when syspreping, then it's normal.
Thanks so much for reminding me of this With things like Vista and up, Syspreping has gotten so much easier that I forgot about the extra work involved in XP and Win 2k
so here is my oobeinfo.ini (product key shown is the sample from the help). I constructed it using all the examples in the ref.chm that comes with Windows XP deploy.cab, simply copy the example, put it into notepad and them modify to meet my needs (rinse and repeat until all sections are in and customized) then save as oobeinfo.ini to the same place as sysprep. Sad part is, even with this in place, I still get the above. Code: [Branding] OemName = "VMWare, Inc." [Options] ;show Admin Password Page Welcome AdminPW = 1 ;Enable anti-aliasing FontSmoothing = 1 ;Show Doin Domain Page in Welcome JoinDomain = 1 ;Display OEM Eula in Welcome OemEula = 1 ;Path To OEM EULA OemEulaText = "C:\Windows\Oemeula.txt" Show Auto-Update Page in Welcome SkipAutoUpdate = 0 ;Show regional settings Page in Welcome INTL_Settings = 1 ;Show time Zone Page in Welcome TimeZone = 1 [StartupOptions] DesktopWindowHeight = 530 DesktopWindowWidth = 640 Offline = 1 Registration = 1 ScreenResolutionCheck = 0 UserInfo] Country = "USA" [Version] ProductKey = "12345-ABCDE-67890-FGHIJ-12345" What am I missing here? Note in the ProductKey value, I use a key generated from a tool Thanks again for any help.