Sysprep Windows 7 laptop with the display ON

Question

I have a Windows 7 image on a Lenovo laptop that I've prepped for imaging from Audit mode.

On running the actual sysprep the display turns off so I can't see what's going on. I can hear the occasional beep and bip but it seems to have stalled after about an hour.

How do I run sysprep and leave the display active so I can see what fails?

(I can return the laptop to the state right before I sysprepped)

Answer 1

Windows removes all drivers by default when sysprepping. In this case it was spitting out a fatal error after removing the video driver.

This unattend.xml exposed the problem:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<unattend xmlns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:unattend">
  <settings pass="generalize">
    <component name="Microsoft-Windows-PnpSysprep" processorArchitecture="amd64" publicKeyToken="31bf3856ad364e35" language="neutral" versionScope="nonSxS" xmlns:wcm="http://schemas.microsoft.com/WMIConfig/2002/State" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance">
      <PersistAllDeviceInstalls>true</PersistAllDeviceInstalls>
    </component>
    <component name="Microsoft-Windows-PnpSysprep" processorArchitecture="x86" publicKeyToken="31bf3856ad364e35" language="neutral" versionScope="nonSxS" xmlns:wcm="http://schemas.microsoft.com/WMIConfig/2002/State" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance">
      <PersistAllDeviceInstalls>true</PersistAllDeviceInstalls>
    </component>
  </settings>
</unattend>