Hello MS,
we tried to install compute nodes via WDS on a Windows HPC Server 2008 R2. After the image is copied to the node we get an error "The unattend answer file contains an invalid product key. ..." and the installation is failed.
This is because we used MAK- and retail-keys from MSDN. The solution was to move the productkey entry to the "specialized"-section of the unattend.xml file.
<settings pass="specialize">
<component name="Microsoft-Windows-TerminalServices-LocalSessionManager" processorArchitecture="amd64" versionScope="nonSxS" publicKeyToken="31bf3856ad364e35" language="neutral" xmlns:wcm="http://schemas.microsoft.com/WMIConfig/2002/State" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance">
<fDenyTSConnections>false</fDenyTSConnections>
</component>
<component name="Microsoft-Windows-Shell-Setup" processorArchitecture="amd64" publicKeyToken="31bf3856ad364e35" versionScope="nonSxS" language="neutral" xmlns:wcm="http://schemas.microsoft.com/WMIConfig/2002/State" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance">
<ComputerName>%COMPUTERNAME%</ComputerName>
<ProductKey>XXXXX-XXXXX-XXXXX-XXXXX-XXXXX</ProductKey>
</component>
</settings>
Our first attempt was to move the %ProductKey% variable to the specialized-section but this failed because of the additional <Key>-attributes. Finally we have to hardcode the productkey into the unattend.xml
Best regards
