Slipstreaming Windows XP

Linc

Thrax shows us the easiest way to slipstream Windows XP.

When Windows XP was released in 2001, it was not foreseen that specialized hard drive controllers for a new generation of hard drives would become the norm. As IDE died its slow death, the rise of SATA prevented the venerable floppy drive from going with it. While Vista accepts CDs and flash drives containing SATA drivers, XP recognizes only the dreaded floppy. Adding insult to injury, those lucky few who have a drive and the appropriate disk are met with scores of updates once Windows is installed. Pleasantly, there is a solution to these common irritations known as "slipstreaming."

Qeldroma

I liked this especially because of the thorough handling of of the drivers and options issues. I remember cobbling together my own slipstreams with Nero- this answers a lot of the questions, gotchas and inconveniences.

Well done, Rob- and thanks.

QCH

I do slipstreaming all the time at work. I've always done it the manual way which takes more time and lot of screw ups along the way. When nLite started a few years ago, I tinkered with it but never gave it a serious thought.

Rob (Thrax) has done a great job walking us through the process and, much to my chagrin, made my way of slipstreaming obsolete.

Shorty

Rob,

You have outdone yourself. That's slick. Shall be following that in the week when I reinstall my desktop (finally!). Cool read

zarlon

Your article is amazing and very useful. You are the only who puts detail in their article that is actually useful. Keep up the good work.

The only problem I had was getting the article printed out without all of the ads & comments. Not finding a print option on the web page I used print preview, paged through until I found "about the author" and used that to print out the pages up to that for each web page of the article.

I am asuming that you play Tabula Rasa since your forum name is Thrax. Zarlon is my toon name when I play.

Thank You

Zarlon

Thrax

No, I don't play TR. My name is actually inspired by a high score on the Autumn Valley track in 1994's The Need for Speed.

I'm very glad I could help you with one of my articles, Zarlon! Thanks for commenting.

jared

I'll poke our web guru with a big stick to see if we can get a "print" button that will render a printable page in the future.

Nice suggestion.

cheers

zarlon

This may sound like a dumb question but here goes.

You indicate that we can add programs by downloading them into the Addons directory. Do they just go into that directory or subdirectories?

I am building two versions, one an OEM (for me at home) and other is a VLK for work. Knowing how they go into the Addons directory will save me valuable time both at work and with my family/friends.

Thank You

Zarlon

PS. I am in the process of looking at all of your articles. Man you are a fountain of information & procedures. You are

Thrax

You download the .CAB/.ZIP/.RAR/.7z files to that directory. It's just a storage folder, really, to keep things organized.

BeeWorker

Hi!

after a very long sleepless weekend, hours of foul language and one big pile of newly burnt useless winxp installation cds - I am left to discover that all hope is lost and despite my heroic efforts to manually (and later with nlite) slipstream blooming windows xp - so it could acknowledge the existence of my very real (just ask Fedora) WD80 SATA drive on my crappy ASUS P4S800D MOBO - the forces of money grabbing evil (i.e SIS hatred, Micro[on global scale]Soft Evil and the rest of the lot) have once more prevailed! for it seems a "txtmode" version of the SIS 180 or 180OB - which according to section 5 of the slipstreaming article is needed for the rest of the just battle - is no where to be found on the World Wide Web - so it seems the only solution will be to write this weird forum S.O.S!

guys where's that driver in txtmode anyone anyone at all!?!?!

p.s
thanks for the article btw if I didn't stumble upon in it (round 4 am or so but still) I would keep burning copies of winxp containing cursed PNP drivers for ever!

BeeWorker

ok think i got it now just had to drop the .oem file in the same folder as the drivers - this will be a good time to blow my brains off for being so dumb after all someone should hold responsible for all the suffering

wildthing423

can you tell me how to create this from the files stored in my recovery partition?


m.

Thrax

It's not possible. A recovery partition is a proprietary piece of technology and generally cannot be harnessed to do anything outside of its intended purpose.

Panduka85

I have maybe the dumbest question... when i add the wmp11 exe to the addons, it says to either install wmp11 slipstreamer or to copy the installed .exe to the nlite root folder. and all the other addons are running the installations while nlite is processing the final steps. why is that ?? do i really have to re-install all my exe s to the pc ?? please help....

Thrax

Where are you downloading the version of WMP11 you're using for nlite from?

Panduka85

microsoft site...
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/Browse.aspx?displaylang=en&categoryid=4

and can you help me with the 2nd and most critical problem ?? why do all the exe s prompt as if i have to install them ?? and when i cancel them, nlite says that the addon is not the expected type...

Cheers...

Thrax

The executables that can be integrated with nLite are not the same type of executable you can download from any website. In the application integration section of my guide there are three links to sites that have software specifically repackaged for the slipstreaming process. All of these sites carry WMP11 repackaged to work with nLite, and you must make sure that all software you're trying to integrate also comes from these three sites.

Panduka85

Thanks Buddy.. i should be able to carry the process from here onwards.

Cheers...

Thrax

Thanks for stopping by, Panduka.

walnutz

THANKYOU! THANKYOU! THANKYOU! I am one of those jerks that never posts comments, but I could not let this one go without expressing my gratitude. I am technical, but by no means a computer builder. Your Slipstreaming Forum was still able to walk me through step by step on how to bring myself out of 3 days of utter computer he((.

I appreciate the help that even the tech at the computer store could not give me. I will tell everyone I know that may be interested in this article all about it, and I look forward to reading more of your work.

You are a life saver. Keep it up.:bigggrin::bigggrin::bigggrin:

Thrax

Thanks, Walnutz. I appreciate your comments.

Bandrik

Bookmarked. While I'm not ready to reinstall my XP builds, I'll sure be wanting to use this when that time comes. Thanks for putting together this how-to guide! =D

BuddyJ

Welcome to Icrontic Bandrik. Stick around for the fun

Thrax

Bandrik wrote:

Bookmarked. While I'm not ready to reinstall my XP builds, I'll sure be wanting to use this when that time comes. Thanks for putting together this how-to guide! =D

No problem, Bandrik! Thanks for commenting!

davelis

great article
it is the first i m integrating components and drivers into a winxp cd
thanx a lot

Jvince

Fantastic article. I've fooled with slipstreaming before but never has it been made so easy. That being said I'm having one issue .

I pretty much follow the recommended slimming of the XP install, adding SP3, firefox, AVG, a few small hardware drivers, etc. Nothing radical. However my install is lagging out when it starts to install network devices. I do have a blown LAN port on my motherboard, replaced with a PCI lan. Other than that it's fairly straightforward. Any ideas where I went wrong to be lagging out here?

Thanks in advance,

-V

Thrax

How is it lagging out?: during the actual installation of Windows? On a specific screen?

Can you take a camera picture of that screen?

Welcome to Icrontic!

Jvince

I didn't have a camera handy, and I've reverted back to SP2 for the moment, but here are a few more details:

During the windows install, after it's installed all the system devices, I hang up at "Installing network components". The blue progress bar gets to about 30% then it will hang there forever. I let it run overnight just to be sure. My normal XPsp2 install cd works fine, and that's the one I used as a source with nlite.

I tried another slipstream version this morning with the same results. That's odd, considering the very first time I tried this as a test on my test laptop everything worked great.

A few other notes:
-my first test showed the modern XP install screens, not the classic. No matter which option I chose last night and today I'm getting the classic install prompts.
-possibly related? My blown onboard LAN started working after a fresh install, but when I installed SP3, it went dead again. Maybe SP3 has an issue with this particular lan?

Thanks for the response and I look forward to browsing your forum daily!

-V

primesuspect

Welcome to Icrontic

Thrax

It is possible that SP3 is quirky with that LAN card. It's fussy with my Linksys WiFi drivers, so there's some corroborating evidence to prove that it's possible.

Did you slipstream your network drivers when making an SP3 disc?

Jvince wrote:

I didn't have a camera handy, and I've reverted back to SP2 for the moment, but here are a few more details:

During the windows install, after it's installed all the system devices, I hang up at "Installing network components". The blue progress bar gets to about 30% then it will hang there forever. I let it run overnight just to be sure. My normal XPsp2 install cd works fine, and that's the one I used as a source with nlite.

I tried another slipstream version this morning with the same results. That's odd, considering the very first time I tried this as a test on my test laptop everything worked great.

A few other notes:
-my first test showed the modern XP install screens, not the classic. No matter which option I chose last night and today I'm getting the classic install prompts.
-possibly related? My blown onboard LAN started working after a fresh install, but when I installed SP3, it went dead again. Maybe SP3 has an issue with this particular lan?

Thanks for the response and I look forward to browsing your forum daily!

-V

Jvince

Nope, the Realtek Lan on my motherboard is detected fine with a normal XPsp2 install, so the drivers must already be there. However now that I think of it I might have removed some of the old "dead weight" drivers from the source disk.

If the slipstreamed XPsp3 disk doesn't support a driver will it hang like that? I always thought it just skipped over unknown devices and left the lovely "?" in device manger.

Either way I took the long route and did a Sp2 install and spent the day installing updates and obscure drivers :P. I'm definitely going to make a custom Xpsp3 disk again for this machine as well as my others but without testing it further I get the feeling that tracking down this particular issue might be tricky.

I'm thinking of starting fresh with another slipstream, this time only taking out a few things (not drivers this time) and adding the essential drivers I need (m.b., audio, video etc). Hopefully I won't need it anytime soon, but my data backup is current and I can always take the long route again if needed.

An alternate idea is to troubleshoot this on my older machine. I don't use it for anything other than studio recording so it's super easy to test on. Maybe I'll try another custom install and see if I can replicate the network issue. If not I'm guessing it's the driver conflict with sp3.

-V