It’s a pain to reinstall the operating system, because you not only have to load drivers, service packs and hot fixes, but applications, settings, and answer a ton of questions along the way. Well, this article is dedicated to creating a build that takes the questions away (unattended) as well as integrates all the service packs and hot fixes you need, and in some case drivers.

nLite

nLite is an awesome tool and you can download the latest version at their website http://www.nliteos.com/. This tool allows you to build a custom Windows XP build, and slipstream:

• Service Packs
• Hotfixes, Addons and Update Packs
• Drivers
• Components
• Unattended
• Options
• Tweaks

And at the end, it will create a bootable ISO image file for you to use. After you’ve finished, you can use either VMWare or Microsoft’s Virtual PC to test the ISO image before burning a finalized disc. So let’s have a look at the interface.

First of all it wants to know where your original XP files are at. I always keep an original copy of XP around to feed it. Then it will ask you where you want to put the files on your hard drive. Once you’ve worked with nLite, you can pull up previous sessions.

Second, you’ll get options of what you would like to do. I don’t always use all the options, I don’t care about options and components, so I skip those.

Getting Started

Service Pack Integration

On the next screen you can choose which service pack to install. Here I have a previous SP2 installation, and I want to slipstream SP3, so I point to the source of SP3 that I downloaded from Windows XP SP3 Download

Hotfixes, Addons and Update Packs

So here is a word about post service pack hot fixes. The place to obtain these is over at http://www.ryanvm.net/msfn/. Ryan has kept up to date on all post service pack updates and rolls them out in 7zip format. All you have to do is download, say the post SP3 update pack, and you’re good to go! If at first you don’t get a fast download, try another mirror! Just insert it:

Ryan’s VM also has a number of addons that are nice, so if you want to integrate IE 7 into your build you can, or such things as .NET 1.1, 2.0 and 3.0, as well as third party software can be easily integrated. This section of the forum has a lot of useful addons, Ryan’s VM Addon Forum Board.

Driver Integration

Now drivers is definitely a powerful feature here. It allows you to integrate RAID array drivers into your build so that you don’t need a floppy to install the RAID drivers for your motherboard. You can choose to integrate more than one set of drivers too, which is definitely nice. It allows you to add RAID drivers for NVidia, VIA, Intel and more, all on one build.

Once this is done, you will want to add your drivers for any RAID array you might have. Have not tested this with other drivers, such as for sound, video, etc. I wouldn’t try to integrate video, as video drivers usually install things like the Catalyst control center, etc, but it will work with any .inf file:

Unattended

Next thing you will want to do is set up an unattended install. This will create a file called winnt.sif in your \i386 folder that contains such things as the product key, turn off the firewall, hibernate, as well as regional settings. I work in a corporate environment, so I use my open license key for my product key, this is nice for imaging a large number of machines. So this deserves a word of mention, licensing. Microsoft has been pretty grey in the area of desktop imaging. However, there is a document put out by Microsoft called “reimaging.doc” that you can download here. Alternative download (October 2008 edition). This means that say you purchased a Dell laptop with Windows XP Professional preinstalled (OEM), this means that you can use open license media (XP Pro only) to reimage that laptop, and be within the legal limits of the EULA.

Here is an exerpt from the October 2008 edition of this document that pretty much spells out your rights as a customer.

Reimaging Eligibility

Reimaging is permitted if the copies made from the Volume Licensing media are identical to the originally licensed product[1]. Volume Licensing customers who have licensed Microsoft software products from an OEM, through a retail source, or under any agreement other than their Microsoft Volume Licensing agreement may use copies made from Microsoft Volume Licensing media. Customers can use these copies from Microsoft media only if they are the same product and version, contain the same components, and are in the same language.

The following are examples that do not meet the eligibility criteria for reimaging:

Different products: For instance, Microsoft® Office Professional Plus 2007 and Microsoft Office Standard 2007 are not the same product and cannot be reimaged. This also applies to the Windows Vista® Business and Windows Vista Home Premium operating systems.

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[1]Windows Vista Enterprise is not available as an originally licensed product, and is therefore not eligible for reimaging.

That little nugget of information has notoriously been subject to a lot of debate and is well hidden from Microsoft’s site, however, they do keep this document up to date, and it does exist!

OK, on to some of the settings.

As you notice, I’ve chosen “Fully automated”, entered my product key and disabled the firewall and hibernation (not suggested on a home network that’s not behind a router/firewall) and skipped the “Out of box experience”, which actually automates everything. A word about OEM Preinstall, I leave it enabled here because we are integrating the RAID drivers, here’s a little more info about that option:

So if you are wanting to use the F6 option, make sure to disable! I haven’t personally used this option, and have seen issues trying to do an F6 install with these builds in the past. I think this option is a newer one, so it may circumvent the problems I’ve seen in the past. On to more options:

to hi

Now, this is a personal option I’ve chosen here. I’ve disabled the administrator account for obvious reasons, and I’ve created a user account “user”. I’ve assigned a password and set autologon to that user, and that user is part of the admin group. This makes it nice, because I also turn on remote desktop services by default as well, under tweaks. This give you the ability to log in to the machine remotely, and give the user the convenience of not having to enter a password at startup, and also secures the machine against hacks to an extent. If you want to change this behavior, all you have to do once the O/S is loaded, is click Start… Run… and type in “control userpasswords2″. Keep in mind that this is based on an XP Professional build .

You need to give it a user’s full name:

You can set your region accordingly if you so desire.

You can also set how Automatic Updates works:

Tweaks

Really the only tweak I’m going to show here is how to turn on Remote Desktop. As a note, it’s also simply a registry key entry to enable remote desktop. When you get to the tweaks section, go under Network / Remote Desktop / Enable.

The registry hack I mentioned above is done as follows on an existing machine. hklm\system\currentcontrolset\control\terminal server is the location and if the key does not exist, you need to add a DWORD entry for fDenyTSConnections and give it a value of 0!

When you click next, the integration starts. It will take a little while, so be patient.

ISO

Now it’s time to build the ISO. Save it where you like and after it’s done building, test it out in a virtual machine using either VMWare or Microsoft’s Virtual PC. That way you don’t waste a blank before it’s time.

As you can see there are several options, including the ability to burn to CD/DVD. Best to create an ISO to be sure.

Resources

Another website you will want to look at is http://unattended.msfn.org/unattended.xp/. It’s where I first learned about unattended installations, as it can be accomplished by hand. They have some great tutorials about how to create your own application installations for Office, Adobe and more.