First Time Poster, Long Time Reader...

essenbe said:

When trying to run sysprep, did you try the elevated command prompt using net stop WMPNetworkSvc ? The only issue that I am concerned about is the restoration having the proper alignment for an SSD. If you did a clean install, Windows aligned the drive properly. Am I correct that you did a clean install to the SSD and it did not boot and found errors?

Here's what I did...

I decided since my machine was fine with the SSD but with the old motherboard and CPU, that I would put the last image I had before the hardware switch over back on the SSD.

But to originally fix the error that causes Sysprep not to run inside Windows, I did a fresh install of Windows onto the SSD. Did sysprep after windows came up and setup. When I rebooted out of Sysprep, I booted into Windows PE to install an image from the server.

That's where the problems started.

I disconnected the 2nd internal drive and turned off my externals, the system only sees the SSD now. What I may do this time around is do a secure erase of the SSD, format and put the image back on like I originally did with the SSD, which originally worked.

From there, I'll delete that reg file again and it will run Sysprep, we'll see if that works.

Put the image back on the SSD. Booted up with just that drive running, booted into Windows. Deleted "Upgrade" from the Registry and still get Fatal Error.

At a lost, going to do more searching...