NewSID on Windows Server 2008?

Edwin M Sarmiento — Sat, 07 Feb 2009 05:11:00 +0000

I made a mistake of not having a backup of my base virtual image for testing and back in the old days, I used the NewSID tool from Sysinternals. Unfortunately, I am not back in the good old days as the tool is only supported to run on Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 whereas I am working on Windows Server 2008. Although there are claims that it would work on both 32- and 64-bit Windows Server 2008, I am not going to spend another minute trying something that I have not validated myself (thanks to a new paradigm in business models) just for this project. My next best bet – SYSPREP. Unlike the days of pre-Windows Server 2008 where you had to find the Windows installation media, find and extract the Deploy.CAB file to you hard drive and then execute the SYSPREP.EXE tool. Not anymore! Widows Vista and Windows Server 2008 has it out-of-the-box (and you wonder why you needed all that hard drive space to install them) on

%WINDIR%System32Sysprep

One thing to note is that you need to check the Generalize checkbox to create a new SID for a cloned system

Edwin M SarmientoSYSPREP – Edwin M Sarmiento

NewSID on Windows Server 2008?