MSFN’s Unattended XP CD – Introduction
Have you ever wanted a Windows CD that would install Windows by automatically putting in your name, product key, timezone and regional settings?
I got carried away again! One of the default sites in the RSS reader for Desktop Sidebar was msfn.org. It just so happened that a beta for nLite had just been released. nLite is a more automatic way of creating bootable installation CD-ROM for W2K, WinXP, etc. with the service pack and patches already integrated. I am interested in having an up-to-date installation disk since it is my traditional way to fix unsolvable PC problems. A slip streamed XP is a step forward but a slip streamed XP with the patches integrated can be a major time saver and much more secure. So I installed Virtual PC 2004 Trial and nLite and went to work. After some initial success I tried Ryan’s update patch where I failed after multiple attempts. It all got very frustrating since I was very close. Yet it became even more frustrating since VPC uses all of my CPU(PIII-700) and the WinXP install under VPC was taking a very long time. I finally got smart and installed VPC on my son’s PC since he was out and his PC was available. His PC(AMD3000+) is much faster and he has the available disk space(2GB). Then I went back to the basics. I created a XP+SP2 disk image and listed the patches required. I downloaded the patches and integrated them individually into a new disk image. Now it works like a charm. I think I will try one more tweak. I am going to slipstream MP10 into the patched version. This would leave only dotnet, acrobat, and JRE for the post installation process. That would be pretty cool!