If you found this post you must understand what a SID is. Juts encase you don’t SID are unique identifiers on computers. Having a unique SID only really matters if you are on a network of computers and part of a domain.
To increase the efficiency of recovering your system, some of you may think of cloning your current system and store it in a portable drive
by using the program such as CloneZilla. If your system died, you can easily plug in the portable drive, and recover your system to the state whereby you do not need to spend so much time on installing necessary software or security updates
for each of the application
This will save you a lot of time.
Sysprep is a tool that will regenerate a unique SID for the operating system, and also it will clear off temporary files, and some of the Internet history records on the based image before you clone it. You can always get the Sysprep tool from the Windows operating system CD/DVD media. Normally the tool is located under \Support\ folder or you can actually get this tool from Microsoft official website. Always remember that, Microsoft ONLY supports the Windows operating system that clones with using Sysprep
For those who would like to perform testing using virtualization, you should try to apply system preparation on your image, to avoid SID crash in between virtual images. To use the Sysprep tool, you can just follow the below simple steps:
- Prepare your operating system and install necessary software on it.
Get the Sysprep tool from Microsoft official website - Extract the tool and put it under C:\Sysprep folder
- Double click sysprep.exe and then click OK
- Click on the Reseal button
You can select the option Used Mini-Setup, if you would like to automate the initial setup for the operating system after you deploy the image to a machine. Besides that, you will need to create one sysprep.inf file inside C:\Sysprep folder. This sysprep.inf file will contain some of the setup information and you can refer to below sample content of sysprep.inf
;SetupMgrTag
[Unattended]
OemSkipEula=Yes
KeepPageFile=1[GuiUnattended]
AdminPassword=”password”
EncryptedAdminPassword=NO
OEMSkipRegional=1
TimeZone=215
OemSkipWelcome=1[UserData]
ProductKey=XXXX-XXXX-XXXXX-XXXXX-XXXX
FullName=”Testing”
OrgName=”Test Organization”
ComputerName=*[SetupMgr]
DistFolder=C:\sysprep\i386
DistShare=windist[Identification]
JoinWorkgroup=WORKGROUP[Networking]
InstallDefaultComponents=Yes