Microsoft offers a system preparation tool called Sysprep, to prepare a Windows system for deployment or redistribution. Some Windows releases include Sysprep on the installation medium, but the tool is also available for download from the Microsoft web site. In a standard For most Windows versions, Sysprep is included in a default installation. Sysprep mainly consists of an executable called sysprep.exe which is invoked by the user to put the Windows installation into preparation mode.
The Guest Additions offer a way to launch a system preparation
on the guest operating system in an automated way, controlled
from the host system. See
Guest Control of Applications for details of how to
use this feature with the special identifier
sysprep as the program to execute, along with
the user name sysprep and password
sysprep for the credentials. Sysprep is then
started with the required system rights.
Specifying the location of sysprep.exe is not possible. Instead the following paths are used, based on the Windows release:
C:\sysprep\sysprep.exefor Windows XP and earlier%WINDIR%\System32\sysprep\sysprep.exefor Windows Vista and later
The Guest Additions will automatically use the appropriate path to execute the system preparation tool.