Hi,
I'm building a new Windows 10 deployment workflow and was wondering if you could provide some information on what goes on with sysprep unattend files during deployment of the master wim image to the target clients. I understand that some of the settings in the SmartDeploy.xml file are somehow injected into this process, but I'm unsure how Windows is handling the various unattend.xml files created and how SmartDeploy interacts with them. I've read about answer file search order and that C:\Windows\Panther is used to keep a cached master copy of unattend.xml that is used by the sysprep phases. I don't know how this is created and modified though, or at what points.
In testing I started with my own unattend.xml file in C:\Windows\Panther\Unattend\ and no others anywhere in C:\Windows. I used this to generalize the master image before capture. I broke out of a subsequent deployment to a target during the postimage phase with cmd /k, and discovered a new unattend.xml file in C:\Windows\Panther (the cached master?) and another in C:\Windows\System32\Panther, neither of which look like mine - they look more like the one used by MDT when creating the master image. Were these created and left over from the generalize sysprep? The settings in my unattend.xml seem to have been disregarded during the deployment, critically an autologon to support PC renaming and domain join (due to computer naming being deprecated in Windows 10 sysprep oobe).
Our old Windows 7 workflow has two copies of our unattend.xml copied as postimage tasks to C:\Windows\Panther and C:\Windows\System32\Sysprep\Panther. I picked this up from a post somewhere several years ago to solve a problem and it worked, but I've never really understood why. Perhaps something similar is required for Windows 10?
Can you shed some light on how this all works please.
Thanks,
Guy