System Preparation Tool? What should I do?

I used Compaq Quick restore earlier today. When Windows reinstalled this message popped up. There's three options but I don't know which one to pick. I included a screen shot. I don't really know which each of them mean. Help please?

 

Reseal, is my opinion. Though, you may want to wait on other opinions.

 

What does reseal do?

 

Typically, the screen that you gave, is after a sysprep has been started. This usually sets the machine as a just booted for the first time situation. It gives you a new sid (system ID). Also, this is used with cloning.

More info:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/d.../xpehelp/html/xeconconfiguringresealphase.asp

Ignore the windows embeded. Still the same terminology.

more info:

http://www.microsoft.com/resources/...Windows/XP/all/reskit/en-us/prbc_cai_oziz.asp

 

I don't really understand what any of that means. So which option should I choose?

 

Reseal as thee fool suggested! This will return it to an as shipped condition!

 

So I pressed reseal and this came up:




What does it mean?

 

Click Yes.

Just a quick note, you started this after doing a restore with compaq correct? This typically wipes everything out if my memory serves me correct.


Anyway, i've PERSONALLY resealed a machine with no ILL effects. Though, you always want to reseal a machine you just cloned. Having a clone on a network can and will cause network related issues, due to identical sids. If you were to reseal the cloned machine, the cloned machine will then have newly created sids. Which will then not create havock.

This has been a practice since the NT4 days (though then we tended to use the gui: NewSID).

 

Every computer, user, and group has a unique SID, or security ID. My PC, for example has this SID:
S-1-5-21-1085031214-413027322-725345543

My current user account has this SID:
S-1-5-21-1085031214-413027322-725345543-1003

My Administrator account has:
S-1-5-21-1085031214-413027322-725345543-500

The Administratrs group is has a builtin (universal) SID of:
S-1-5-32-544

SIDs are what Windows actually uses for determining what user account you are. So while I might say my computer is MYPC, and my account is MYPC\User, the computer sees that as SIDs.

The "SID problem" is that when you make an image of a disk and distrubute it to 1,000 clients on a corporate network is this: If I'm in the local Admins group of the first PC, that group has a SID of S-1-5-21-1085031214-413027322-725345543\S-1-5-32-544. If the computer SID is the same on every PC in my domain, then being in the local admins group of this one PC gives the the right to access all other PCs with this same SID (all 999 of them) from this first PC as though I were an administrator. As far as Windows can tell, I'm an admin because the SIDs are all the same even if the network name is entirely different.

Oops.

You have even more problems on a real domain with domain controllers because that's how the domain thinks of all your computer accounts.

So when you repackage with Sysprep for corporate distribution, you need to instruct Windows to generate a new SID or use a tool like Sysinternal's NewSID to change the SID so that they are correctly handled as different PCs with different authentication.

 

Do you think it will hurt my computer if I reseal it?

 

It should not, specially, since you just did a restore with the compaq restore function. Why did you initiate this? Was it due to problems? If it was due to problems, perhaps we could have helped instead of using this "COMPAQ" functionality.

 

I wasn't having any problems, I just wanted to clear my system.