Windows 7 Screen Resolution defaults to 1024×768 – Alternate/proper way to do it

A colleague asked me why I didn’t use the UI to change Screen Resolution in my previous post?

Well, I usually do. And I intended to show how to do it in that post, but there is a minor problem with doing it in MDT 2010. If you try to edit a X86 image on a X64 computer, you will get a error. And I felt I didn’t want to complicate things with solving that first. So I showed how to edit the unattended file manually.

But here is a solution to that problem (written by my colleague Jeanette some time ago) and a complete walk-through on how to do it from the UI, which is how I prefer to do it.

The error text you may get is is;

“Unable to edit the unattend.xml for this OS because no catalog could be located or generated.

And you may sometimes also get this error;

Performing operation “generate” on Target “Catalog”.
Unknown error (0xc1420127)

As mentioned above, it’s because you are trying to edit a x86 image on a x64 OS.
The solution is to just generate the missing Catalog file that MDT doesn’t manage to create for you.

You can either install MDT on a x86 computer, and open the Unattended file from there once, to generate it or use this workaround.

1. Go to MDT WorkbenchTasksequences (remember to use DeploymentRepository)
2. For each Operating System (source) that you have imported, there is two corresponding TaskSequences. For example “INSTALL Windows7” and “CAPTURE Windows7”.
3. Make a note for the ID of you x86 Captured Image “CAPTURE Windows7” (762286D6-etc in this example).
4. Navigate to MDT WorkbenchOperating Systems
5. Right click on your Operating System that you used to install the Captured machine with, and make a note of the GUID in the Path field.  (63e5d2e0-etc in this example)
6. Open Explorer and locate the matching Folder in your DeploymentRepository.
   drive:SpecopsDeployDeploymentRepositoryOperating Systems{guid from step 5}sources
   In the Source folder, locate the CLG-file, it’s usually called something like Install_Windows7 Enterprise.clg
7. Copy that file from the Original Source folder, to your captured images folder.
   drive:SpecopsDeployDeploymentRepositoryOperating Systems{guid for captured image}
   To find the GUID of your captured image, do exactly as in Step 5 but for your Captured image.
8. Now, rename the CLG file in your Captured Image folder so it contains the GUID from Step 3.
   With exactly this syntax, here is the file for this example.
   Capture_762286D6-C03F-4C98-9134-BD7B17D0D766CDrive.clg
   Notice that it has to be named  Capture_{YOURGUID}CDrive.clg
9. You should now be able to edit the Unattended File via the GUI.
   Just delete the Screen Resolution section under here to make Windows 7 dynamically set the screen resolution.
    

Note; you may need to install proper Graphics drivers (import into your Driver repository) to get the dynamic screen resolution to work correctly.