Don’t you just hate it when you are preparing some sysprepped Windows Server 2008 VHD’s you use as a template for all your Virtual Lab environments with Virtual PC, sysprepped the Server 2008 installation and during deployment you find out you messed up a setting in the sysprep XML file? Well I do anyway, so here goes .

Windows 7 (and Windows Server 2008 R2 as well) has a really nice feature called Atach VHD available in the Disk Management MMC (diskmgmt.msc for you geeks )

So you just attach your sysprepped VHD file and replace the Windows\Panther\unattend.xml file with a corect file (for some reason editing the xml file directly gives some access denied errors, mess around with Take Ownership and setting some security permissions, you all know how it’s done ). Detach the VHD file and there you go… nice and smooth mini-setup of Windows 2008 or Vista