Vista: Setup Configuration Passes

Pass 1 windowsPE

Windows PE is a minimal version of Windows that is designed to prep a system for installing Windows on it, and you can use Windows PE to boot a system that has no operating system, partition and format its drives, copy disk images to the system’s drives, and launch Setup from a network share.

This really means two things: the windowsPE pass is equivalent to the first phase of Windows Setup, but it’s also something standalone by itself.

Pass 2 offlineServicing

Settings for this configuration pass can be used to do things like add additional drivers, security updates, hotfixes, language packs, and other packages to your Windows Image (WIM) file. Note that you can’t add boot-critical drivers during this pass—these must be added during the windowsPE pass described above.

From the perspective of running Windows Setup, the offlineServicing pass happens during the second phase of Setup after the .wim file has been copied to the system’s hard disk. This is because the image has to be applied to the hard drive before it can be serviced by Package Manager, the built-in tool in Vista that is used for applying updates, fixes and packages to the image

Pass 3 specialize

This pass is used to configure system-specific settings such as network settings, internationalization, domain membership, and so on.

Pass 4 generalize

This pass is closely tied to using the sysprep /generalize command. Sysprep , the System Preparation Tool, is used mainly to prepare an image for deployment onto multiple destination computers.

Pass 5 auditSystem

This pass happens only when Setup is running in audit mode using the sysprep /audit command. Audit mode is used in certain deployment scenarios for adding various customizations to a Windows image and bypasses the final Windows Welcome phase of Setup. Whatever takes place during the auditSystem pass happens in the context of the Local System account and occurs before the user logs onto the computer.

Pass 6 auditUser

This pass is similar to auditSystem (i.e. it only happens when Setup is running in audit mode) except that whatever happens during this pass occurs in the context of the user’s account and takes place after the user has logged on to his computer.

Pass 7 oobeSystem

This final configuration pass corresponds to the beginning of the third and final phase of Setup and is used to configure happens during the Windows Welcome phase of Setup.


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Reference: http://www.windowsnetworking.com/articles_tutorials/Deploying-Vista-Part3.html