Powershell – Run Elevated Powershell prompt from command-line

Taken from http://poshcode.org/695

function elevate-process
{
$file, [string]$arguments = $args;
$psi = new-object System.Diagnostics.ProcessStartInfo $file;
$psi.Arguments = $arguments;
$psi.Verb = "runas";
[System.Diagnostics.Process]::Start($psi);
}

elevate-process [full path to your process here]

What @Tony Roth said. If VMware's own customization process is run with elevated privileges then all its child process should do so too, so launching a Powershell script there should run with the associated processes.

If not then I don't know a way of elevating without interaction. Thats kind of the point of the elevation system. The code above will elevate a process from a non admin to an admin userspace, however you will have to click past UAC, I use this in my builds.

Startup contains the Elevate-Process script that simply calls the main script. As the machine starts after first boot it kicks this off, you click on OK on the UAC and it completed the rest with admin privileges.

As an alternative perhaps disable UAC in your initial build and then include code to re-enable it at the end of the build?

This looks like it will help with that but note I haven't used it.

Is explorer simply not starting? have you tried typing explorer.exe in the command prompt window? I guess this isn't the case you wouldn't normally get a command prompt when logging in. It sounds like somehow the shell has been removed, effectively giving you a server core install, in which case try issuing the following from the command prompt. This should re-enable the shell if it has been somehow disabled.

Dism /online /enable-feature /featurename:Server-Gui-Mgmt /featurename:Server-Gui-Shell /featurename:ServerCore-FullServer