darcham

Just wanted to join in and get feedback/wisdom from my peers. Good help is hard to find in these parts. Maybe someday, I will be able to contribute some help to someone else. Regards David

I had no problem with Dell OEM CD (Win XP), I used nLite to slipstream and create an ISO. Works beautifully on any Dell we have in house. I have been having problems with Compaq OEM CD because of the 2-CD system of recovery to factory settings. I think the OEMBIOS files are on the Recovery CD, separate from the XP CD, both which shipped with the units, but I'm confident that I can solve this one now that I know about the OEMBIOS files. I will try the Getfile.bat trick tomorrow, and hopefully have a One-CD recovery system. We also have several IBM Netvista PCs. IBM gave me a 4-CD set of recovery disks. None of the CD's are called WinXP, they are just CD1 to CD4. I tried to copy the CDs and they didn't work. Has anyone had any luck with slipstreaming for Netvista? Regards David

Yes, there is an I386 folder, and on the Compaq Restore CD, there's 4 more. I've tried over and over to get the Compaq slipstream to work. The end result is a fully slipstreamed OS DVD that installs as Windows XP SP(zero) when used in conjunction with the Compaq Restore CD. Yes, I said DVD - the OEM XP CD that shipped with our Compaq PCs measures almost 750MB when copied to the hard drive and grew to about 900MB after slipstreaming. No, I don't want to fiddle with removing features - Tried it and kept getting windows protection errors every time something changed on the PC. I just want low maintenance no fuss. So, I figured fine, I'll just install the OS without using the Compaq restore CD. Who needs them anyway... The result was Windows XP SP2 with all the current XP hotfixes, and all the correct OEM drivers. And even better, the system tray isn't cluttered with OEM junk. Wheeeeeee! - then wham! - the OS wants me to activate within 30 days. So basically my question is, how do I integrate the two? Regards David The Slipstreamed OEM Dell CD works perfect on our Dell computers - of course Dell integrated the activation into one CD.