I received this error this morning while trying to deploy a new virtual machine from a template in VM Virtual centre and having found the solution I thought I may as well blog it for other people who may have the same problem.
We recently moved all of our management from one physical server to another and therefore this problem arose as this problem happens due you not having the ‘SysPrep’ files on the machine from which you are running Virtual Centre.
All you need to do to fix this is extract all of the contents of deploy.cab from the OS cd for which you are trying to customise/deploy. The location you will need to copy these extracted files too varies on the OS of the management machine but for 2003 server it will be under C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\VMware\VMware VirtualCenter\sysprep.
Under the folder structure above there are different folders for each OS you run from your virtual centre machine so obviously if your vm templates' OS is windows server 2003 R2 x86 then you will copy the files to that folder.
Once the files are copied to the correct folder restart the deployment tool again and the customisation wizard boxes will now be available for selection
Gregg Robertson
Conchango
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