One of the frustrating road blocks I’ve run into with this Windows 7 SOE was related to the machine name. Under the Windows XP SOE task sequence, there was a simple script that extracted the asset tag field from the BIOS and used that as the basis for the computer name. One would think this would work without issue for Windows 7. As it turns out, I was wrong.
After much hair pulling, I decided to check for non-visible characters by checking the length of the string. Normally there is 9 characters. When performing this check under the Windows 7 SOE, it returned 10 characters. It seems the Windows 7 installer doesn’t like having a space in the machine name. Once I added some code to remove these sort of characters, the problem went away.
[cc lang=”powershell” line_numbers=”true”]
strAssetTagNew = trim(strAssetTagNew)
[/cc]