I fired up my desktop machine a few nights ago only to hear loud clicks and clanks coming from the system drive. Never a good sign--I could not resuscitate it. Through some amazing bit of cosmic luck I'd recently backed up my photos. My email is already archived on Gmail. That's most of what I care about so I ordered a new über-drive to start from scratch.
As XP loaded on my machine I soon noticed it was only reporting 137 Gb of my 620 Gb drive. That addressing limitation is a "built-in feature" of the original Windows XP. Though later service packs fixed this shortcoming my disk was an original. I pondered for a few seconds before I found Paul Thurott's SuperSite for Windows and his detailed instructions for "Slipstreaming Windows XP with Service Pack 2 (SP2)"
Yes--SP2 has been replaced by SP3, but the concepts and directions worked perfectly. More on that directly, first a little explanation of "slipstreaming."
"You can copy the installation directory from your XP CD-ROM to the hard drive, slipstream the XP SP2 files into that installation directory, and then write it back to a recordable CD, giving you a bootable copy of the XP setup disk that includes SP2 right out of the box (so to speak)."
In my case installing directly to a post-Service Pack 3 state saved lots of time beacuse,
"SP3 includes all previously released Windows XP updates, including security updates, hotfixes, and select out-of-band releases. - Microsoft Windows XP Service Pack 3 site"
There are many, many steps in the slipstream process, but I think Thurott's instructions are so detailed and well illustrated anyone (really--anyone) can do it. Just read carefully.
Unfortunately, installing once is never enough. An internal multi-format memory card reader plugged into a USB port was seen by my BIOS and assigned drive letters before Windows could install. My system drive was relegated I:! That should work. Sometimes it doesn't. For example Adobe's latest version of Flash won't install without a C: drive--which they admit.
"This is a know bug. Was fixed in Flash Player 9, then must have gotten unfixed in the player 10 code branch." - BWolfe
Thanks Adobe. That's 45 minutes I'll never have back.
As you might expect my reinstalled XP boots quicker and runs faster than it did before the crash. That made this whole experience nearly worthwhile. Being a promiscuous downloader it probably won't last!
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November 2, 2008 4:28 AM
Have you considered Nlite(vlite for vista)
it would make it much easy to slipstream the service packs and any drivers you need?
November 4, 2008 4:53 AM
Yes I would highly recommend n-lite (nliteos.com) over this method in this article. I used this exact method before and it was quite time consuming and left little in the way of customization. n-lite, on the other hand, allows for a simple slipstreaming of SP1/2/3, or whatever patches you want that may have come out post-SP3, or whatever drivers you may need (i.e. SATA or raid controllers), and then allows you to configure whatever accounts you want, unattended installation, etc etc.