Sysprep.exe completely missing on both of my Windows 7 64bit machines. How should I find a workaround?

Question

The sysprep.exe file is simply missing on my Windows 7 64bit machine. I tried to find it on another computer, but it wasn't found there either. I can't understand it, because on a lot of forums and even in the official articles there are a lot of references to this tool.

I've checked system, system32, sysWOW64 folders, and even made a full search with Total Commander. I only found a sysprep folder in the system32 folder, but inside was only an en-US subfolder, which was empty.

Then I thought I will give my Windows PE bootdisk a try, which I've created a while ago. No result, only the same empty en-US folder is present there as well.

Please if anyone knows what's happening, point me to the right direction. I need to clone my system and I'm stuck right at the first step...

Solution

You may try to extract sysprep.exe from the installation media.

Put the install disk into your optical drive, then select the "folder" option at Autoplay (or, if Autoplay doesn't work for you, right-click the drive and Open to view its contents)

Next, open the sources folder and look for the install.wim file. Next, open it with the 7zip archiving program (WinRAR doesn't seem to recognize the file). Open any of the numbered folders (each of which represents a different version of Windows 7, but which should all contain the file you need) and navigate to Windows\System32\sysprep .

Then copy over the contents into your own %windir%\System32\sysprep.