This afternoon, after installing the Hyper-V role on a Windows Server 2008 computer, a server I was working on restarted and went straight into to Server Manager (without displaying the Initial Configuration Tasks wizard). Whilst Server Manager is a perfectly acceptable way of configuring a server, I wanted the administrators for whom I was preparing some build notes to use one tool (i.e. to provide some consistency) – and the Initial Configuration Tasks Wizard also serves as a handy quick reference. This is not the first time I’ve seen the wizard disappear after installing Hyper-V, so I decided to investigate running the wizard manually and it turns out to be quite straightforward.

Simply navigate to the Start Menu and in the search box type oobe. Once you know the filename (the full path is %windir%\system32\oobe.exe) it seems logical (OOBE stands for Out of Box Experience) but, until today, OOBE was something I’d equated with client operating system releases.