sysprep leaves me with eng-US and not what was in unattend.xml

[vk5pj 0]

Hi,

I have been loading an image from SCCM onto a new hardware platform that we plan to purchase for the 2015 deployment across the school. We are lucky enough to be able to send the completed image to the vendor (we use imagex to create a WIM to be sent to them) to be loaded onto each PC in the factory.

 

When testing the image after having run SYSPREP and rebooted I can see it's default language is eng-US and not eng-AU that was specified in the unattend.xml file used.

 

Other than relying on group policy to change this order for me later on, does anyone have any ideas why the selection of the default language is unattend.xml is not honoured after the image is syspreped and rebooted?

 

Regards,

Peter Sumner

Down-under in Australia

[tribe81 1]

Hey Vk5Pj

 

do you have the SystemLocale, UILanguage & UserLocale all set to en-AU in your unattended.xml ?

[vk5pj 0]

Hi tribe81,

yes in my unattend.xml I have this:

 

<component name="Microsoft-Windows-International-Core-WinPE" processorArchitecture="amd64" publicKeyToken="31bf3856ad364e35" language="neutral" versionScope="nonSxS" xmlns:wcm="http://schemas.microsoft.com/WMIConfig/2002/State" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance">
<SetupUILanguage>
<UILanguage>en-AU</UILanguage>
</SetupUILanguage>
<UILanguage>en-AU</UILanguage>
<UILanguageFallback>en-US</UILanguageFallback>
<UserLocale>en-AU</UserLocale>
<SystemLocale>en-AU</SystemLocale>
<InputLocale>en-AU</InputLocale>
</component>

 

Tried it with the fall back language set to en-AU and it did not improve the outcome. maybe I should have posted this snip at the start.

 

Peter.

[tribe81 1]

Hey Peter,

 

sorry for the late reply, any luck with resolving your issue?

[vk5pj 0]

Hi, not yet, still get eng-US as the default language after I load the sysprep'd image to a PC. The desired eng-AU is there in the list but not selected as the default language.

 

getting a flat spot on the forehead from this one as it takes so long to build test check, build test check. Maybe I should try multiple sysprep's on the one image but did not want to pollute my testing.

 

Peter

[vk5pj 0]

looks like this is a dead end, thought for sure there would be a NOOB user who knew the answer to this.

[anyweb 472]

have you verified the contents of the unattend.xml file before and after setup windows and configmgr step ?

[vk5pj 0]

Hi Anyweb,

this process is not being done in a SCCM task sequence, the sysprep action in this case is being done manually from the CMD line to prepare it for a manual capture using imagex, we then ship the captured WIM file to our hardware vendor for them to pre-load onto the hardware we are purchasing.

 

We have a dummy Hostname in the unattend.xml that we then use a VBscript to search and replace during the first boot up sequence of Windows, this prompts the technician to enter a HOSTname and then we insert that into the unattend.xml file instead of our dummy name.

 

Doing this cuts down on the: boot, change name, reboot, join domain, reboot sequence that had to occur previously to put a new PC onto the network with the correct hostname. (we like to know which classroom each PC is in when something goes wrong)

 

The unattend.xml was built from scratch in the "Windows System Image Manager" and then copied to the c: drive of the PC before sysprep.exe is run.

 

This process is based on this article: http://community.spiceworks.com/topic/427460-sysprep-to-change-computer-name

 

I had noticed that the correct language order was not being honoured last year (Windows 7) but just relied on Group Policy to fix up the order for me but thought I should try to find out why this happens for this years PC's (windows 8.1 x64).

 

At present it is still a mystery as to why us-ENG is the top of the language order.

 

Regards,

Peter Sumner

[morrell 0]

I've only just joined and this is the exact reason why I joined did you find a solution?

[vk5pj 0]

Hi Morrell

well its image time again so the whole saga starts again today. Have fiddled some more with my unattend.xml today and installing a fresh image on our sample PC for the new delivery. Not expecting too much to be different as I thought I had tried most options.

 

Will update the thread if I have any news.

Peter.

[vk5pj 0]

Not really sure why this helped but removing a value from here did it for me.

 

before

<UILanguageFallback>en-US</UILanguageFallback>

 

after

<UILanguageFallback></UILanguageFallback>

 

now when I run sysprep, the machine comes up as EN-AU as intended, so I am not going to argue.

 

here is the full block (near bottom of sysprep.xml)

<component name="Microsoft-Windows-International-Core-WinPE" processorArchitecture="amd64" publicKeyToken="31bf3856ad364e35" language="neutral" versionScope="nonSxS" xmlns:wcm="http://schemas.microsoft.com/WMIConfig/2002/State" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance">
<SetupUILanguage>
                <UILanguage>en-AU</UILanguage>
            </SetupUILanguage>
            <UILanguage>en-US</UILanguage>
            <UILanguageFallback></UILanguageFallback>
            <UserLocale>en-AU</UserLocale>
            <SystemLocale>en-AU</SystemLocale>
            <InputLocale>0409:00000409</InputLocale>
 </component>