tommyp

It was a long and tedious process that took about 4 solid working days. Basically I started this effort after many failed XPCreate attempts with the October 12th hotfixes. XPCreate is a great program, but it wasn't really cutting it for me with that last go around of hotfixes. I don't have all the details in front of me now, but here's basically what I did. Some of the file names listed below may not be correct. But you can get the jist of what I did. To slipstream the IE6 into your w2k installation, you need modded XP files (ie.in_, wab50.in_ and msoe.in_), several extracted files from the IE6 installer cabs, a modification to the txtsetup.sif file to add in some additional files, and SFC.dll & SETUPAPI.DLL files located on FDV's website. I then ran XPcreate with a round of hotfixes that I knew worked to get a working source and tested it with a virual pc. Then I copied the files from my IE6 modded installer over (a series of DLLs, infs, exe's and the new txtsetup.sif) to the working source directory. I found out that modding the syssetup.in_ file cannot be modded. The only issue I had with integrating IE6 was that there was no IE icon on the desktop or the quicklaunch area. The quicklaunch block was there, but IE wasn't. IE gets installed and remains a hidden file. The icon can be turned on with a regedit though. Once that was done, I had two or three more hotfixes to further integrate. So I expanded the remaining hotfixes and assembled them all into a work folder overwriting old versions. Once that was done, I began preparing a load of inf files that accompany each of the hotfixes applied, and once w2k is installed, it runs the INFs to put in the registry changes that are needed by each hotfix. Last nite I integrated the MDAC into my source. Directx9 will remain as a stand alone installer for now. The HFNETCHK program says all hotfixes are applied as far as file revisions go, however, windowsupdate said I was missing 5. One was ironed out (some msxml issue). So for now, I'm working on the last of the 4 critical updates to report correctly. I believe my w2k i386 folder was somewhere around 250 meg with all the updates applied. That does NOT include WMP9 series as I hate that program. Total install time of W2k less programs is a whopping 15 minutes. I'm sure it will be less once I nlite it. If you need more details, let me know. I'll start a new thread on how I did it. TommyP

It IS possible to have IE6 in w2k's i386 folder (with lots of tweaks). I have just finished a cd that has all the hotfixes (except MDAC), ie5, oe6 without ever running a hotfix executable. Installation time was shaved by about 25%. Before anyone asks... I think it's about 100 meg of updated files. Ouch. It's sort of a slipstreamed W2KSP5.

I thought I was the only one with the taskmanager-only OS! Good thing I started reading this thread! I read that there seems to be a lot of problems with the latest round of fixes. I also read on a website that there is a problem with the 841356 and 834707 patches with the shlwapi.dll file. Both hotfixes have it. Someone says that there's something with the same filesize and version but different checksums. Maybe that's a clue? I haven't run xpcreate after removing 834707 one yet to see if that's the problem.

Thought I can add my $.02. I crafted a mini batch file that will hopefully help out with automating this process. It's probably not the cleanest as I'm not really an IT guy. If you have winrar, you can run the CMD file directly, otherwise you'll need some editting. Create a new folder called whatever you like. Put three files into it. 1. The Nero installer renamed to "neroinstall.exe" 2. The following file called FIX.CMD CLS @echo off ECHO Deleting working files if previously run if exist files1.txt del /q files1.txt if exist files2.txt del /q files2.txt if exist files.txt del /q files.txt if exist filesfinal.txt del /q filesfinal.txt if exist swap.cmd del /q swap.cmd Echo Echo extracting Nero "%ProgramFiles%\winrar\rar.exe" x neroinstall.exe Echo Get directory listing (delete folder names and working files) dir /B /S > files1.txt findstr /C:. files1.txt > files2.txt findstr /v "fix.cmd fix2.cmd files1.txt blank.txt filter.txt neroinstall.exe" files2.txt > files.txt del /q files1.txt del /q files2.txt Echo Make final listing of files to swap findstr /i /G:filter.txt files.txt > filesfinal.txt del files.txt Echo Preparing zerobyte file Echo. > blank.txt for /f "usebackq delims==" %%1 in (filesfinal.txt) do echo copy /y blank.txt "%%1" >>swap.cmd swap.cmd 3. Last file is called FILTER.TXT. It's just list what files you want as zero byte files. There's no need to put the full extension. Some of the guys on the forum started listing some zero byte ones on pages 3-5 of this thread. Maybe someone is crafty on figuring a textline approach of creating an SFX installer to add to this CMD file. Hope this helps us figure out a quicker way to make a smaller installer.

I had the same problem with deleting a folder like that. To get rid of it, I changed permissions of the folder to allow the administrator full control. For some strange reason, the folder had a read-only attribute for the admin.