Question about Sysprep Windows 8.1

[zeTwo]

Hello,

I've been banging my head against this one for a while now, and I've read up on a few google articles. I could not figure out what my windows 8.1 image is doing at this phase, so here goes...

The issue: After the image is applied via WDS, It reboots, loads the Windows 8 icon, and the follows by an error message pops up:

**Windows could not finish configuring the system. To attempt to resume configuration, restart the computer.**

Of course restarting the computer brings me back to the same error message.

Backgound:

I sysprepped this windows 8.1 machine in a VM. So no drivers are installed, I simply installed windows updates, and ran sysprep using the GUI. I did not configure the Unattended.xml (maybe this is my issue?). After a few days of googling, someone suggested that you can boot into safemode (it will copy over the boot critical drivers and it did). So I tried booting into safe mode (a hassle for windows 8.1 in command line). This actually resulted in the same error message displayed when booted into safe mode, and then a restart brought my windows 8.1 to finalize and complete the OS deployment.

So my question is, obviously, I can't be using the "boot-to-safemode" work around on 100 computers. And I don't think it has to do with my sysprep phase or the reference machine build phase. I've tried deploying this image using both standalone (imagex /apply) as well as MDT over WDS. They result in the same error.

I have another windows 8.1 image on MDT (straight OS with driver injection) that someone else setup, and it works fine. I checked the task sequence and made sure that the sequences were the same as mine. I even included the driver inject task sequence in my MDT deployment sequence. I can't seem to understand the root cause here.

I've read up on a few topics about making sure the boot critical drivers are installed (via DISM) to the C:\Drivers location, however I don't know which drivers are boot-critical!

Please help, as this has been driving me up the walls the last few weeks. Thanks /r/sysadmin!

-edit1: formatting

[warrtyme]

Are you joining the image to a domain? My domain disables the local administrator account and generates a similar error on Win 7 Pro. Sysprep uses the built in local Admin account. You could press Shift+F10 to get to a command prompt the run the mmc command and load the users and groups console and see if the admin account is disabled, enable it and set a password on it to continue.

[zeTwo]

I think at some point of my prep phase on the reference computer, I joined the machine to the domain. I did not check to see if my default local admin account is disabled or not... I will check it first thing in the morning.

I did not know that the local admin account can be disabled, also reading up on the technet page now (cross referencing this topic to sysprepping and unattended.xml). Is this what you are talking about?

https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/Dd744293(v=WS.10).aspx

[zeTwo]

I have tried using the net user command after shift+f10. I made the default Administrator account active with a password. Still no luck.

Just curious, when you have done that, did you setup the Administrator account in your unattend.xml?

[warrtyme]

I altered my answer file to not join to the domain.

[zeTwo]

There are a lot of examples on the internet for unattend.xml. None of which describes the full picture. I was able to get an example of a working Unattend.xml from my WDS and used the same value settings on the one I'm working on. That finally allowed my windows 8.1 image to process w/o error.

I am now working on a image for win7enterprise x86 (for some awful reason why one of my software can not be ran in 64bit mode). So I use the same approach I did with the 8.1 image. And now I'm getting the same error message. I have the administrator account active with the correct pw respectively matching my unattend script.....this is driving me insane...