Just a quick post to outline how to rectify the problem of Sysprep failing on Windows 10 1903 with error:
"Sysprep was not able to validate your Windows installation..."
The following screenshot shows the error in more detail:
I had read a lot of articles and Microsoft forum posts that discussed removing Windows Apps via Powershell and numerous other theories and I tried them all, but nothing worked. I then came across one sentence in a Reddit post here by ScotTheDuck, that states all that needs to be done is replace the spopk.dll file in C:\Windows\System32 with a working file from a previous version of Windows 10. You can download the file that worked for me here...
To replace the file in C:\Windows\System32 you'll first need to take ownership of the file. Open Windows Explorer and navigate to C:\Windows\System32 and find the file named spopk.dll. Then follow the steps below:
Click OK through the resultant screens to complete the ownership procedure. Once complete, you'll have the necessary permissions to rename the file so we can replace it with the working file I've provided for you in the link at the beginning of the tutorial. You should be able to rename the file to something like spopk.dll_old.
Now extract the file from the zip file you downloaded earlier from this tutorial and copy the extracted spopk.dll to the C:\Windows\System32 folder. Now reboot your PC. You should now be able to run sysprep without issue.
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