Windows 10 1809 - Sysprep Fail

[Ron Miller]

Ticket created. Uploaded log files.

[leeharrison.nomical]

Has anyone rectified this yet. Surely a new machine isnt the only way to go? Thanks.

[justinsamsel]

It's not super happy news, but It's definitely the only way to go. This happens with other imaging software too like Dell ImageAssist. It's not a SmartDeploy bug- it's just how Windows behaves when you attempt to capture and then sysprep from a VM that has done a major Windows upgrade.

[SmartDeploySupport]

Hi Lee, 

Unfortunately, Justin is correct - we no longer recommend upgrading your reference VM from one major Windows 10 version (e.g. 1803) to a later Windows 10 version (e.g. 1809). The in-place upgrade process from Microsoft (which includes a Sysprep run, and retaining an entire previous set of Windows.old files on the VM, adding several GB to the image size) leaves the VM in a less reliable state for capture, Sysprep, and deployment. Our best recommendation if you wish to deploy a new major Windows 10 version is to build a new, blank VM and install that Windows version using OS media from Microsoft that includes that version. Then run all available Windows Updates (for that version only - no major version upgrades), gracefully shutdown the VM (shutdown /s /t 0), capture, and deploy. Once you've confirmed the VM has produced a good image, back up a copy of the VM in its known-good state, and then you can begin installing software and configuring as needed. This way, you'll always have a good copy of the VM to fall back on if any software installation or configuration change results in an unusable image.

In order to deploy a Windows 10 Version 1809 image, you will need to have SmartDeploy version 2.0.3025 or later installed, and be sure to recreate your SmartDeploy media after installing the new version. 

Please feel free to reach out to support if you have any questions or issues - you can reach us at support@smartdeploy.com.

Glenn
SmartDeploy Support

[Andrey2018]

Can confirm after recreating a new 1809 image, deployment was successful.

 

[boomerman]

Is the answer still to this issue is I have to build all new images if I want to use 1809?

[Jeff Harris]

Boomerman; Our recommendation is to always build a new VM when looking to deploy a new major version of Windows 10. The upgrade processes of the Spring/Fall updates has consistently, yet unpredictably broke the Sysprep process in which we rely on. 

[worcestersoftware]

I had the same issue after upgrading to 1809 and found this fix that worked for me.

Reddit Sysprep 1809 Fix

Run regedit and delete "Upgrade" from "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\Setup"

Re-capture the image and redeploy and sysprep should be successful. 

Saved me hours and hours. 

[Jeff Harris]

Worcestersoftware; Thanks very much for sharing this. I will make sure this gets shared internally and tested as a reliable solution. I believe this is similar to the solution when Windows 10 sysprep was broken in v1511, if I'm recalling correctly. 

We have noted 2 different sorts of failures; one resulting from what is best described as a "bad upgrade" where the sysprep logs will have grown over 85MB in size.