Change the ComputerName value in Unattend.xml using PowerShell

A quick and dirty PowerShell script to update the value of ComputerName in Unattend.xml before imaging.

This particular value is located at:

<unattend>
 <settings pass="generalize">
  <component name="Microsoft-Windows-Shell-Setup" processorArchitecture="amd64" publicKeyToken="31bf3856ad364e35" language="neutral" versionScope="nonSxS" xmlns:wcm="http://schemas.microsoft.com/WMIConfig/2002/State" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance">
    <computername>

Which is a bit of a mouthful, but we can be lazy and just pull the value from the nth component node (in my case it's 3, or the 4th component node). PowerShell uses dots to describe the hierarchical path, which looks a lot neater than the above:

$xml.unattend.settings.component[3].computername


To repeat, the value of .component[n] will change depending on the structure of the file.

The value of the computername node can be changed by just providing the new value:

$xml.unattend.settings.component[3].computername = "$computerName"


The imported XML then needs to be saved back to the file on disk:

$xml.save("$unattendFile")

1:  param(  
2:       [parameter(Mandatory = $true)]  
3:       [ValidateNotNullOrEmpty()]  
4:       [string]$computerName  
5:  )  
6:    
7:  Set-ExecutionPolicy Unrestricted  
8:    
9:  $systemDrive = $env:systemdrive  
10:  $unattendFile = "$systemDrive\Unattend.xml"  
11:    
12:  [xml]$xml = get-content $unattendFile  
13:    
14:  $currentName = $xml.unattend.settings.component[3].computername  
15:  write-host "Current Name: "$currentName"`n"  
16:    
17:  $xml.unattend.settings.component[3].computername = "$computerName"  
18:    
19:  $newName = $xml.unattend.settings.component[3].computername  
20:  write-host "New Name: "$newName"`n"  
21:    
22:  $xml.save("$unattendFile")