"The system is not fully installed": Windows XP, WMP 11 and Sysprep
Kudos to lizardking009 for this post at the 2cpu.com forums.
After using Sysprep to prepare a new Windows XP build for distribution to some Dell laptops, I got the a message saying The system is not fully installed when trying to restart the machine.
It turns out that this is due to the presence of Windows Media Player 11 which screws up the Sysprep process somehow. I can't say that I'm a big fan of this DRM-laded stuff, but generally speaking you always load the latest version of everything before resealing the machine to take an image from it.
Microsoft have this knowledgebase article showing how to recover from the problem, although I discovered that this does not work very well on machines that have already been built from a Sysprep (such as Dells). If you're working in a reasonably well equipped environment with another XP machine and a suitable external USB drive enclosure then it's probably easier to edit the registry on the affected PC's hard disk by plugging it into the USB port of another machine, i.e.:
- Load REGEDIT
- Select HKEY_USERS
- Go into File.. Load Hive..
- Browse to the \WINDOWS\System32\Config\System file on the USB connected drive
- Name the hive "system" or whatever you like
- Find the Setup key on the newly loaded hive and locate SystemSetupInProgress.
- Change the data from 1 to 0.
- Unload the Hive
posted by Conrad Longmore at
14:07
11 Comments:
Thank you very much for the procedure... I was just wondering how do you know that it is Windows Media Player in cause ???
19 April 2007 07:02
It is Windows Media Player. After uninstalling Windows Media Player 11 and the WMP 11 Runtime, sysprep worked just fine.
29 April 2007 06:16
You're a freaking genious!
30 May 2007 19:27
Thanks for this!!! Also, a tip that saved me a bundle of time, if you have already captured the image of the sysprepp'ed machine (the one that does not boot) you can mount the image with the windows automated installation kit tool, imagex. Mount the image, then run regedit and load the hive of the sysprepped machine's image, fix the registry entry, unmount the image and all is good, no need to re-do your master image anymore. (Which would have saved me half a day at least!!)
Thanks again, I was about to format and reinstall before I found your blog!
-B
21 June 2007 21:39
WMP 11 Indeed. This ought to be the #1 link on the search results page.
21 September 2007 05:10
It's ammusing, WMP 10 must have caused the same issue. I've been experiencing this when creating images after installing optional updates for over 2 years. Very agrivating that MS has yet to publish an article that properly identifies the cause of the problem.
Glad to finally know what update is the root of the issue.
11 October 2007 19:32
Just wanna say thanks for your post, it saved us heaps of time!
All the best
Roadford
22 October 2007 16:02
I have an image that has this problem without media player, what is the runtimes KB code?
2 April 2008 23:06
sorry i mean, i'm not running windows media player 11 on the system and still recieving the same error upon deployment. Only XP home is affected for me which is frustrating. Need to get this sorted asap. any ideas please mail me steven@the-ark.co.nz
8 April 2008 02:05
Thanks,
If you have access to an ERD Commander or BartPE CD, you can boot into that CD, run Registry edit and set the key to 0.
17 May 2009 00:36
WMP 11 is not the only reason this occurs. Im still testing now, but many of you may have followed guides on the internet which suggest getting deploy.cab from an SP2 CD. Now if you're like and you use nLite to make your original slipstreamed CD, you wont have deploy.cab. So you may have used (like me) the SP2 version of deploy.cab. Im thinking this may be the problem. I dont know yet, but Ive just download deploy.cab for SP3 from MS, and Im going to try it all again. At no point did I install any WMP11 related stuff throughout my build, and I still received this error. Will post back and let you know the outcome.
20 January 2010 04:11
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