Hi guys. I have a question for you. My sister-in-law have a laptop wth a siezed HDD and orderd a SSD for it as a replacement. She lives quite a way away from me (like a four hour round trip) and Im supose to help her with the clean install of Win 10. Now, i have the SSD here, but not the laptop. Is there a way for me to pre-install the OS into the SSD, mail it to her and have her drop it into the laptop, boot and finnish of the installation her selfe? My ideas goes in the ways of building the install on a VM and sysprep generalize that and mount it onto the SSD without ever booting it so her first experince woud be OOBE. How do I set about to move it of the VM and onto the SSD? Best regards Rab.
If she's competent enough to open the box and replace the HDD with a new SSD, I'd think she was certainly good enough to install Windows 10. Once the installation starts you essentially just follow the screen prompts. From my perspective, installation of Windows 10 is pretty simple. You may have a problem going from an HDD to SSD, but you'd likely have that regardless.
I have no doubt shell manage that installation her selfe, but shes lazy... And her 10 yrs old kid is probobly ending up swaping the disks for her just to get it done... So to help the kid along I thought this to be a solution that might work.
Unless you have to install programs you can do this. Then there's always Teamviewer to fix things afterwards, given that the needed WLAN drivers are there. Either way, find out if her laptop is set to UEFI boot or not, or she might not be able to use it.
Shutting down a running install isn't really a good option, going into audit mode, sysprep and oobe, generalize (this will undo any specific system settings and drivers, to prepare the install to be used on another system), shutdown will reset the install to go to OOBE the official way. I would recommend doing it on vmware with a dedicated physical drive and capture the install to a wim/esd and from that create a new iso and let the 10 year old kid install it for her Or on a hyper-v install and after generalizing, oobe and shutdown mount the vhdx in windows and capture it.
No need to follow the relatively complicate path of sysprep generalize unless you have very exotic drivers/programs that must be installed first. Just deploy the system using dism /apply-image (or inagex or gimage) and set the bootloader using bcdboot is all you need to have a fresh system installed. Matter of 5 minutes of work on ssd.
Actually if you choose the "Add a virtual harddrive later" option you can mount a physical harddrive directly to Hyper-V just as you can in VM-ware, and doing the install in Audit mode update, install programs and so forth untill satisfyed and ending with the Sysprep with Generalize and shutdown options worked like a charm. Her son actually did install the disk supervised by me, so the whole exercise was in the end quite unnessecary, but a fun experience never the less. Thank you all who have taken your time to help me with this.