Systems Management

I've been trying to streamline our imaging process, and being able to enter the computer name before kicking off an image would save a lot of time. Currently I'm mounting a native .wim image to the drive and copying a modified unattend.xml file to the panther directory with the ComputerName attribute missing so that OOBE prompts for a computer name. After entering the computer name a bunch of automated installs kick off that take about as long as mounting the image itself. Setup will just sit there waiting for the technician to enter a name, so if you start an image and forget about it, it will still take a while to complete after you remember. Pretty inconvenient.

I've seen that it's possible to modify the GUI in the "Deploy an Image to this Machine" screen using just a preinstall task as this happens when you include the USMT Scan User States task - so would it be possible to create a task that adds a text box for a computer name? I see that the Get Computer Name task reads the computer name from the registry and saves the name in a file in petemp named by mac address, I think the same thing would work here too. The mid-level post install task that copies over the unattend.xml file could then be modified to copy the base xml to the temp directory, modify it with the computer name attribute, and then move the modified file to the panther directory on the deployed image.

I tried looking at the Scan User States task and couldn't really figure out how it modified the KBE GUI, so I'm kind of stuck now. Any ideas or input would be greatly appreciated.