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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.”
Once the domain of OEMs, slipstreaming allows a user to bundle newer service packs, updates, drivers or even applications right into the Windows install media. With the recent release of Windows XP Service Pack 3, there has never been a better time to build a disc to suit. In the following pages we’ll tailor your old Windows XP CD to reduce its size, install faster, recognize your SATA drives during install and pre-install your favorite applications.
All this customization was made easy by the 2006 release of nLite, which made the cryptic art of slipstreaming broadly accessible. A clever combination of intuitive menus, concise documentation and easy-to-use automation has made it a rapid success. In this feature, we’ll be using nLite to help us to customize a US English version of 32-bit Windows XP. Because any good project requires a little prep work, we’ll begin the process there.
Getting nLite Ready
Step 1A: Download and install Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 SP1
1B: Download and install nLite (v1.4.5 Final at the time of publication)
1C: Lastly, prepare a directory structure as seen in figure 1-1:
Fig. 1-1: Choose an empty folder and create these directories inside of it.
Preparing Items For Integration
Step 2A: Download the Windows XP Service Pack 3 Network Installation Package to the Service Packs directory you created in step 1C. Because nLite will integrate SP3 automatically in later stages of this guide, do not extract or run the executable.
2B: As previously indicated, it is possible to build SATA drivers directly into the Windows CD, thereby averting the need for a floppy drive. These drivers are often difficult to locate, so we have prepared a driver package for the major AMD, Intel and NVIDIA chipsets of recent make. You can download the driver package from our repository and extract it to the drivers folder created in step 1C.
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