Slipstreaming Made Easy
For a soon to be revealed reason, I ended up reformating my Windows hard drive and installing a fresh copy of Windows XP Professional. It's been a long time since I've done that because I forgot how much of a pain it was to install Windows on a SATA hard drive. Microsoft never included SATA drivers in any of their XP installations (even SP2) so you have to download the correct drivers for your hard drive controller, put them on a floppy disk and press F6 during the installation process so Windows knows you have extra drivers to install.
One problem I had was that I didn't know exactly what SATA controller I had on my Dell and even their support website didn't tell me. I ended up having to go to Intel's website and download the SATA floppy utility based on my 925x chipset. Their utility bundles about 10 drivers for each SATA controller that they make so I had to pick the correct one. If you guess incorrectly you have to reboot and start the installation process over again. Well about after the 5th try I got it right and was able to install XP.
The next issue I had was that even after XP was installed, Windows didn't recognize my video card, sound card, or network card. Well since I don't have a modem or any dial up service I needed my network card operational so I could connect to the internet and download the rest of my drivers. I ended up using my flash card from my digital camera to transfer the correct Broadcom Gigabit Ethernet drivers from my Mac over to my PC.
I could have avoided all this nonsense by creating a slipstreamed CD of Windows XP. I've done this before when merging a service pack but it required following a lot of steps that someone posted on the internet and I didn't really know how to add drivers.
After some quick searching on Google I found a wonderful utility that walks you through the process called nLite. Within a few minutes I created a bootable ISO (which I then burned on my Mac) that contained my SATA and network drivers along with some special Windows customizations that I normally would perform after a regular install (like getting rid of that annoying Windows XP Tour popup). The best part is that nLite is totally free. I highly recommend it for your next wax on wax off project.
posted by Marcos at June 20, 2006
4 Comments:
Mac FTW! Nuff said!
You guys know that I'm Mac all the way, but if you want to play games, you gotta have Windows so why not make it easier?
Krudd, I had to look up what FTW meant on Wikipedia. Hopefully you meant the fourth defination and not the third!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FTW
This is the first I've heard of Windows XP not supporting SATA hard drives. Are you saying that it's impossible to re-install Windows without a floppy drive (or knowledge of slipstreaming beforehand)?
I'm a bit overdue for a complete reinstall myself and just noticed that my system came bundled with 2 CD's- a HP Resore Plus! CD and a HP branded Windows XP PRO SP1a CD. I'm assuming your Dell included a similar CD bundle. How come you didn't go this route or is there a disadvantage to re-installing this way?
Yes, that is true. It's impossible to install any current version of Windows (either NT, 9x, 2000 or XP) onto SATA hard drives without including the correct SATA drivers. Vista does include SATA support but that OS is still in beta so I didn't include that info in my blog.
OEM's like HP and Dell include these drivers with their "special" CD's that ship with their computers. I don't like going this route since they typically bundle a bunch of junk that I don't want on my system. Also the device drivers they use (although very well tested and stable) are usually very out of date. You end up spending a good chunk of time upgrading those for the best performance.
If you don't slipstream or use the OEM drivers you have to have a floppy drive. No exceptions (even copying the SATA drivers to a CD won't work). This caught a lot of people off guard when SATA disk became the norm since a lot of new computers followed Apple's lead and didn't include floppy drives.
I like to run lean and mean so I always do a clean install with a original XP disk and then add the latest drivers later. The nLite product is very good, you can slipstream Service Pack 2 and your network drivers so you should be set to download whats missing afterwards. Your Nvidia drivers and audio drivers should never be slipstreamed but rathter added after the fact.
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