Page 4 - Slipstreaming SP2 with Hotfixes

I just did this for a bud and after I reinstalled XP fresh, I went

to http://www.neowin.net/forum/index.php?showtopic=409564

Look for "FTP Mirror provided by niksa: December 2005 Full | Lite"

http://www.neowin.net/forum/index.php?showtopic=419470

Look for "FTP Mirror provided by niksa: Jan 2006 Update"

and added all the MS patches to date in one fell swoop.

Bugs

Udated the list-- went from 19 fixes to 46 since May05... I hope that SP3 comes out soon, make this a lot easier.

I am about to install a SATA drive which is the reason for the updated Slipstream, so once I get all teh particulars down, I'll include it in here.

Hey, guys....found a really nice relevant link that I wanted to leave for you...


Windowx XP SP2 Problem Solver

It has a really nice section on slipstreaming among other things.

All right... I know the answer is in these forums somewhere, I just can't find it.

I have a Dell Latitude (I know, let's not go there) which came with XP Pro pre-installed and no discs. I want to upgrade to a larger hard drive but still maintain a "legal" version of Win XP Pro on this machine so I don't have to worry about updating problems and such that occur with my current slipstream disc.

Now, I seem to recall something about copying the contents of my System32 folder into i386 or somesuch, but I can't find the resource that told me those particulars.

There's also the matter of getting the key to work (last time I tried to reuse the key for a laptop, it didn't work).

Can anyone help me out with my conundrum?

why not just copy the contents to the new hdd, like making a mirror image using dd?

Do you know of a way to clone a bootable drive to a larger drive so that the larger drive is also bootable?

The answer is in these forums somewhere, but in any case, it's a good time to review.

Upgrading Your Hard Drive Without Activating Windows

Made several posts that go into detail about the inner workings of Windows Product Activation, so I'll spare the small talk and get right into the details.

As you remember, there are a series of yes and no flags that determine when your system needs to be reactivated based on hardware settings. If you are upgrading the hard drive in a machine, the base hardware remains the same except for the hard drive itself.

WPA doesn't care about hard drive models, but it does check the Volume Serial Number (VSN) associated with the drive. Thankfully, we can forcefully set this on the new drive. So, let's grab the current VSN by running vol from a command prompt. Write that baby down.

Next, we want to back up the current WPA files. A floppy or thumbdrive will do nicely. Go ahead and grab wpa.dbl and wpa.bak from the System32 directory.

You have now completely backed up your current activation status. Go ahead and install your new drive and either install Windows or restore your backup disk image.

You should now be booting into Windows on your new drive. You may get a balloon message indicating that you need activate. You can ignore that for now since we're gong to restore our activation status.

First, restore the VSN from the old drive. The freeware utility VolumeID works quite nicely for this. Once you've assigned the old VSN, reboot your machine for it to take effect.

Now you can drop in the files that you backed up to your floppy or thumbdrive. Copy them back into the System32 folder and overwrite as necessary. One final reboot will leave your system in the same activation state it was prior to upgrading.

This has been another insider tip, courtesy of your friendly neighborhood Windows Guru. Thanks for playing.

Thanks, Nilpo... now, is there going to be a problem with using, say, my aforementioned slipstream disc to install XP Pro as opposed to the OEM disc that was used for the original install?

I can't recall. Perhaps a little rep would jog my memory, lol. j/k

No, as long as the slipstream is using the same product key, you're ok.

The problem I ran into on the last laptop was that the original product key would not validate on the slipstream installation... OEM.

Until the price of XP Pro goes down significantly, I am getting less and less comfortable with changing hard drives...

I'm used to doing fresh installs, so I have no idea-- is there an inexpensive way of backing up and restoring the OS from my existing drive to a larger one?

... and what's the deal with those $6 Windows Authentication Hack CDs on sale at eBay?

I can't do inexpensive, I hope free is good enough.

http://www.thefreecountry.com/utili...pandimage.shtml

If you're using Maxtor drives, I've had good results with the MaxBlast that comes with it.

Otherwise, take a look at HDClone.

HDClone did the trick... this is a pretty awesome little program; I may have to review it.

I will write up a separate thread to cover this.

In Nilpo's reference link, I found the answer to my original question, which is to use the c:\i386 folder (or whichever the system drive is) to create the bootable installation disc from, but alas, my laptop does not have that folder. So the HDClone method was the perfect solution for me-- I have tripled my storage capacity in a little over two hours.

Actually, it does. System Restore maintains a backup folder that contains the important contents of the I386 folder from the installation disk. The cool part is, that it is updated with each service pack so no slipstreaming is necessary.

C:\Windows\System32\dllcache

The remaining files will be on the C:\ root and the System32\config folder.

It takes a little patience to get the files you need, but if you have no setup disc, it can be done.

On a side note, you can also recreate a boot CD using the repair boot floppies that are freely available. Check out bootdisk.com to download those.

Great guide. but there is a easier way to do this.
if you havent heard of this program, well now its time to.
http://www.nliteos.com/
its called nlite.
here are the features from the website (one of them is integrate hotfixes)

Have you ever wanted to remove Windows components like Media Player, Internet Explorer, Outlook Express, MSN Explorer, Messenger...
How about not even to install them with Windows ?

nLite is a tool for permanent Windows components removal and pre-installation Windows configuration. After removal there is an option to make bootable image ready for burning on cd or testing in virtual machines.
With nLite you will be able to have Windows installation which on install does not include, or even contain on cd, the unwanted components.

Features

* Service Pack Integration
* Component Removal
* Unattended Setup
* Driver Integration *
* Hotfixes Integration **
* Tweaks
* Services Configuration
* Patches ***
* Bootable ISO creation

and here a website that has a update pack you can integrate with nlite. http://www.ryanvm.net/msfn/