Bypassing user account setup in windows 7

Question

Edit: Solved! I made a fresh drive clone, ran sysprep /audit /generalize /shutdown, swapped to the target system, booting into windows 10 and used regedit to load the win7 software hive, set registry values for automatic login and disabled UAC, dropped the driver installers into Roaming/Microsoft/Windows/StartMenu/Programs/Startup and booted it. Worked perfectly.

What would be the easiest way to automatically bypass the setup (timezone, location, create user ect) that takes place after a windows installation, on a computer that has no functional input devices?

So far i have tried a boot-time scheduled task to install USB drivers (which does nothing as far as i can tell), an answer file (Autounattend.xml, in C:/ - also does nothing) and dism from a functional windows 10 OS on the same drive (to install USB drivers - it 'successfully' installed the drives and made the target OS unbootable).

The backstory is i need to move an old, heavily used windows 7 system (coming from intel core second gen) to a ryzen system. Reinstallation is not an option.

I made a clone of the OS drive, booted it, used sysprep with /oobe /generalize and swapped the drive to the new machine. It boots fine, but gets stuck on setup. If i can get past setup, the USB drivers will be automatically installed.

Would any of the following be possible and more/less likely to work:

A; Creating a custom windows service to install the drivers, and moving it to the target system.

B; Preparing a new drive in a way that will skip the user creation, with an answer file or other method. sysprep documentation seems very limited.

C; Installing the correct drivers from windows 10 or winPE.

I have a windows 7 installation media USB, more USB drives, functional windows 10 and ubuntu on the target computer, and several other functional computers. The target computer has no functional network connection or access to a PS/2 keyboard.

Answer 1

I presume your original computer isn't available anymore ?

Moving from an Intel architecture to AMD/Ryzen poses it's own challenges. They make your problem far worse.
Just loading the USB drivers won't work. You also going to need a completely new set of motherboard/chipset drivers which are going to be a prerequisite for the USB drivers themselves.

I would clone the original hard drive to a VDI, VMDK or VDHX image and mount it on the Windows 10 install as a virtual machine (using respectively VirtualBox, VMWare Player or Hyper-V, whatever you like best).
That should be by far the easiest and most reliable method to get at the software/data from the old system.
If that doesn't perform good enough for you purpose you can always make another clone of the virtual disk and experiment with that as much as you like (without touching/messing up the original...).
You would need to pre-load that image with the Ryzen/AMD chipset and USB drivers and then clone it to a real hard drive. That should (in theory) get you to the point you can use an USB keyboard/mouse after Windows 7 has auto-detected the drivers.

(Please note: If you try to run Windows 7 on newer hardware, like all Ryzen motherboards, you will have to explicitly enable CSM or Legacy boot mode in the UEFI bios. Your old Windows 7 is really going to need that even if it was originally installed on a UEFI bios.)