bilemke

I'm having a problem here with nVidia drivers, and I think it's possible that your post would explain my dilema, except for one. Please be patient, I'm a newbie at this. When making my unattended CD, I noticed that all my nVidia drivers _except_ the SMBus drivers installed i.e. audio/video/ethernet/display drivers. I didn't really take notice of the device in the *system devices*, but only looked at add/remove programs and noticed the NVIDIA nForce PCI System Management drivers wasn't listed in the options to be removed, only the other drivers had that option. When installing them all manually, after installing an nLited XP SP2[without drivers], the SMBus drivers appeared in the add/remove programs..........then being more curious, I did take notice in the System devices, and noticed both entries for nForce4 HyperTransport Bridge and nVidia nForce PCI System Management. I'm assuming by being a *null* service as you mentioned, that you mean when looking at the properties section of those drivers where it says that "no drivers are required or have been loaded for this device", when making a query on the driver details??? So if the SMBus drivers are not loaded, why when I install them manually after a fresh nLite install, does it show up in add/remove programs? When I first made an nLite with adding the drivers, I was concerned about this, so I remade it without a driver installation. Is it therefore correct to add the drivers into an nLited install and not be concerned whether or not it shows in add/remove programs, but makes those changes in the system devices?? Thanks! My system is ASUS A8N-SLI nForce4 AMD Athlon64 3500+ 1GB OCZ DDR eVGA GeForce 6800GS 74GB WD Raptor sATA 250GB Seagate sATA I see you PMed me even though you replied to a post by Glen.. This is why I didnt notice this sooner.. Couple things, being they are simply for the sake of a name in device manager, I wouldnt even both with them. But, if you do, I would not be concerned about the Add/Remove Program entry.. It is probably not there because the driver installer program from nvidia probably adds it.. Since you are not running the installer, it doesnt show up.. I usually only integrate the drivers need to get the install done (IDE/RAID in particulair).. Beyond that, they are updated so often and I like to have the very latest drivers, so I just install the rest after I am in Windows.. I know some may have a purpose for installing them from a integrated source though. Either way, at a minimum, dont bother with the Add/Remove.. If you install a new driver without uninstalling them it wont hurt anyway.. Not saying you might not run in to trouble if you dont uninstall the other drivers though..

Smart a**.. You really like to brag your net connection dont you? http://www.msfn.org/board/index.php?showtopic=55962&st=15#

Nope, they just give names and put the devices in a category in device manager instead of leaving them as "Unknown".. Otherwise, no performance gain, no functionality gain.

Search google for a public proxy.. Pick one... Enter it in under internet explorer options like discussed above.. Key is.. it has to be one on a port besides 80... Otherwise their proxy (probally transparent) will try to pick up the traffic again. That should atleast do for web/http downloads.. Should.. No gurantee though Some download sites might not like that either.. Since someone might be using the same proxy as you, so it will show up as multipe people downloading from the same IP again. Sometimes ISP's try this to save bandwidth.. Seems the smaller USPs do it. Can be a big pain in the ***.

Another thing I have seen slow the shutdown of some of even the fastest machines... External harddrive enclosures attached via firewire/1394, and in some cases USB.. More so some firewire enlcosures with harddrives in them.

From what I have heard, the wim image has changed every other build of Longhorn in the Pre-B1 builds.. I think it will not be a big deal.. Just te image format will change but the method of using the images will be the same. I am not a big fan fo sysprep, buy you could be encountering problems native to sysprep and unrelated to the fact you are usign wim images. Without having really run into the sysprep problems myself.. Reading about he limitations has somewhat made me stray away from using them.. I am thinking of using a PXE boot of WinPE2005 and then using wim image across a network.. This should be pretty fast.. Only otherway I have seen to speed up installs based on a wim image made right after textmode setup is to have the i386 folder also be in the wim image so that the setup files are copied to the drive when applying the wim image.. This almost doubles the image size though. I might not mind this as almsot everything I work on has a dvd-rom drive atleast.

True, PXELINUX you can have a nice menu and boot something besides WinPE 2005 though.

Actually, if you dont use RIS, it isnt that bad.. It involves and CD ISO of a bootable PE cd, a simple freeware tftp/boot server.. And extract and renaming (no, not even editing, just renaming) a few files from the cd to put in the root of a tftp server. Oh yeah.. you need a copy of SYSLINUX/PXELINUX (a tiny download) that is also easy to come by. In case you are not familiar with Linux, dont worry.. It isnt that hard to use as a boot loader.. If you have ever used CDSHELL on a bootable cd you should have no problem. I will see if I can find the instructions I got from another site and have used in the past. Before someone defends RIS all out.. It isnt bad.. But I dislike having to use Microsoft for everything.. DHCP and what not.. One freeware program plus SYSLINUX can do almost everything I have seen RIS do.

Well... I have been playing and have had no problems yet.. Atleast not like the one you described. Problem I am having is imaging it at the point where I wanted to is not very practical... Windows setup will still want a cd for some of the isntall in one scenario. In the other, it wont need the cd, but to accomplish this I need all (or atleast some more) of the setup files from i386 folder of a setup cd to be in the hard drive (wim) image, which adds to the size of the image and takes more space on the hard drive later. I will get to playing again later.. Need to take care of my car (hit a a deer, or more like the deer hit me).

I did this a long time back.. It involved vey delicate editing of txtsetup.sif and scsi.inf in i386 folder.. I did not have any duplicate files though.. For those that I did, I replaced the old version in winodws with a newer version from a much newer driver.. I used it for a while to get away from usiing $OEM$ folder on cd.. Problem was... the f6 problem and a remainging need for winnt.sif.. I needed winnt.sif to automatically put the key in windows setup, and I figured, why not just use $OEM$ anyway. I will did through some cds to see if I can find an old version with a edited scsi.inf and matching txtsetup.sif.. One note, this will make every device driver in scsi.sif unsigned because of the changes and setup will complain if you dont shut off driver signatue checking. This method is also somewhat unclean as it will leave even unused driver files that you integrate in the c:\windows\system32\drivers folder if you integrate more then just the needed drivers for one particulair machine. Note, my current cd works in a reverse manner.. I have made it so that the only things winnt.sif and $OEM$ folder do is my scsi/raid drivers and my product key.. Otherwise, all other files are directly added to windows via addition to txtsetup.sif, dosnet.inf or the system hive files that end up being the registry. Then I make a multiboot cd with 2 options.. One option runs a setup/i386 folder with winnt.sif present and one without.. So, worst case, i run option 2 and use f6 if the driver is not on the cd, and only difference in the sequence and end result is that I have to manually type some info in to windows setup. Which, btw, I normally manually fill everything except the product key.

I will see if I can dig out a generic Intel 810 chipset P3 Dell I got at my shop today and see if I can give it a go.. Still need to take the time to do a partial windows isntall and make a wim image of it yet.. So.... Might take a while. Then will try to apply it to a clean drive again. Update: One note, my plans were to not use sysprep, but to start a windows setup process and wim image it right after the first reboot of the text mode portion of setup.. I feel I can do all the manipulation I need from that point.. This way I think it might let me use the image for almost any machine given the right scsi/raid drivers.. Otherwise, I think I would run in to too many issues trying to use it on machines with different bootable disk/controller types (even with sysprep).

Sweet.. Access to xplode will be cool. BTW, new avatar I see..

It was done by a patch made by someone on the net, plus the use of a emulation dll. Not sure if this should be in MSFN forums though...

Sweet.. I am going to be watching this thread daily for a while now.. Please keep up your reaserch.. And thank you for sharing your ongoing findings.

True.. As far as I can see it can only add images and remove images.. I was hoping for a more usefull editor like being able to see and manipulate the files in the image files. More like editing a disk image (iso or otherwise) with WinImage, WinIso, UltraIso, etc... This would make manipulation very easy instead of having to make a working hd partition and then imaging it each time a change is desired.

Ah, figured as much.. I guess I just wont exclude it and I will be fine.. Seeing as boot ini has been the same for every machine I have installed xp on to this date... Always first partition of first drive in system.. Going to give this a try tonight.. Then I can manipulate the post-text/pre-gui setup files before making a wim and essentially bypass the need for OEM files and such.. And, not have to integrate raid drivers into the text setup portion, just put then on the drive to be wim'ed and point windows to the location in the registry. If only someone would make a wim file editor for winodws liek there once was for the older wim formats in early longhorn bulds..

Yeah... noticed the findings on your site.. Just checking to be sure as your findings kind of through me for a loop.. What sort of error are you getting regarding boot.ini? Non existant... Or just invalid? Doesnt it get copied to the drive along with the rest of the wim image? BTW, Wraith, sorry for referring to you as VoidFX.. You avatar stands out quite a bit when I look at your posts.

Very interesting VoidFX.. This is somewhat what I have been looking to do for some while.. For a while I was going to consider ghosting a partition right after the text mode portion of setup to accomplish this. But bootsector/mbr would still have been a problem for me on a brand new HD.. Currious... Was mbrfix the magic bullet that finished the job off? For some time I tried cheating by using ranish partition manger or some other program to alter the MBR after applying a ghost image... Anyway, I am reallllllly excited about this since I have wanted to skip the text mode porion of setup for sooooooo long now.. And, still be able to use different hal types with one image, it would be so cool. The possibilites if this could be made to work..

Yeah, no real horror stories for me with XP.. I liked 2k.. I really like XP... Same annoying problem with setup trying to isntall winodws to D: or E: etc instead of C: when it sees a zip drive or some other removeable usb drive.. 2k did that to though with enough drivers during setup.. Otherwise.. XP is very nice compared to 2k.. And 2k and Xp are far supperior to 9x and nt 4.x and older.. Wish xp and xp-64 were in the same NT version instead of xp being 5.1 and xp-64 begin nt 5.2 like windows 2003.. Otherwise, still like it over xp-64 even. Haha. Update.. Was browsing hotfixes today, and MS have gotten a few complaints (or whatever you want to call it) They have a KB article in regards to picking drive letters during setup. http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=896536

Welcome to the forum.. Simple answer.. They dont exist by default on a stock cd. .You need to make them.

This, I knwo for sure, has come up a couple/few times in this thread besides you. I personally dont think it is possible to move all of windows from one drive letter to another.. Program files directory.. maybe yes.. Documents and settings folder, yes again.. But not all of windows direcotry.. There are sooooo many things to change just that I am aware of.. Probally many more too. Reinstall or restore from a ghost image is definately the best way to go.

sx150 is in line with the tx4000 card.. The tx2000 uses the same drivers as the fasttrak 66/100/133 cards. So, the sx150 drivers will not work (or at least not very likely) with your tx2000. Looks like promise is only got beta x64 drivers fro their serial ata based controllers (and some what the tx4000 which is PATA because of teh sx150 driver).

Sorry about the slow response.. Been busy for a while and almost foregot this thread.. Why you may ask? cause it is very slow. I can ghost the files it puts on to my hd from a ghost image on cd to my hd faster then it can do it. I tried this from PE once and it is much faster for me.

Just look at the the windows version number.. It tells you all.. 5.1 vs 5.2 vs 5.2... That is xp-32 vs 2003 (any version, 32 or 64) vs xp 64...

Dell? Yeah.. I voted other.. build it yourself.. I think unless it cost more then $2,000 (maybe more) I wouldnt touch a dell.. Everything below that $$$ is soooooooo lame. Then, for $2,000+, oh, the machines I can/could build custom. Update: BTW, $2,000.. not counting a junky Dell/Lexmark freebie printer or a cheap little monitor. I cant see buying a machine with either of these "included" as a "special bonus".