Drgnfyre

XPCreate appears to be dead. Does anyone have a suggestion on a viable alternative? I love how Alanoll is offering an 'alternative' method to get the new XPCREATE, but the impression I get is that there will be no future support for this (given how hard it is to get a free license and the fact that even commercial license requests are being ignored). I was looking at possible nlite. Ideally I'd like something that does the windows install, and gets all the patches installed. It doesn't necessarily have to be slipstreamed like XPCreate's is. Suggestions? Thanks.

I think I've been fairly patient. I'm up to the third request now without any sort of reply at all. I am not using any sort of spam filter / verification type thing at all - not using a hotmail type of account. I have folllowed all directions completely and have not heard anything back at all.

It's been a while since I've tried, but I do believe my previous attempts to have a winnt.sif on CD and floppy met with great failure. What might be an option would be to build a 'multiboot' type of cd. I use XPCreate's image as my primary source, and then I use some of the tactics described out at FlyaKite's msfn page ( http://flyakite.msfnhosting.com ) to build a menu, etc. Currently, my All in one XP CD has XP Pro and XP Tablet on it, with about 5 options for each. One of the options is for a 'clean' boot of XP with no cd-based winnt.sif associated. You could build a CD that had your 'generic' winnt.sif as one option, where they'd have to enter the username and key if they hadn't built their floppy yet, and a 'floppy' version that would not have a winnt.sif associated with it, which would then grab it from floppy, if available. Granted, your floppy winnt.sif would have to be the whole thing, but you could put the items that change frequently at the top for easy modification. IF there is a way to make it take a floppy winnt.sif over CD based, that would be a better solution, but I'm 99% certain that will not work. Good luck - just throwing out ideas as I think of them. (I know my option would be a lot of work, but it might be worth it if it would save you time in the long run).

Cool. Not a show stopper, by any means. I just want to say thanks again for your excellent program. XPCREATE has saved me many, many hours on building my all-in-one CD's and images.

AKA - Tablet 2005.. (for those that don't know, Microsoft is officially calling Tablet XP with SP2 - Windows XP Tablet Edition 2005 - confusing, isn't it?) Just for clarification. I am using the Windows XP Tablet Edition as my source for both XP Professional and XP Tablet. This works great, and the only difference is, when you enter a 'tablet' product key, it extracts a few extra CAB files (TabletPC.cab and now NETFX.CAB) to install the pen support, etc.. I've used this configuration with XPcreate for SP1 integration and all updates after that with great success.. Now I've updated to use SP2 integrated for both, and have hit one very minor snag with the tablet side of things. When it goes to run the MS .NET 1.1 Framework (that xpcreate downloads and rebuilds), the setup program comes up and says something to the effect of "cannot run because the following programs are running - XP Setup" I've taken the nice repackaged dotnetfx and successfully ran it via guirunonce without any problems (I also threw .net 1.1 SP1 there since it has wierd switches). I just thought I'd check and see if anyone knew what might be causing this minor snag? Other than that, I'd basically like to report Success of XPCREATE Integration with Tablet SP2, in case anyone else out there is trying the same setup. (I'd like to say it worked perfectly the first time, but I'd be lying --- but it was my own fault it didn't work right the first time

Thanks, Greenmachine. Failsafe mode is indeed my next test. The 'digitally signed' bit was what was throwing me the most. My drivers do indeed have the .cat file with them, so that answers that question, at least. I will try it without the drivers integrated and report back as to my success or failure. I'm guessing that it will work, as I've used this cd on many other systems without the ultra card with great success. Thanks again for the input, and a big thanks for XPCreate in the first place!

I recently added the Promise Ultra drivers to my XPcreate image - everything seemed to be working fine. (yes, everything was working fine BEFORE I added the drivers.) The problem I am having now is, Windows XP will Install just fine (even sees the drives on the card in text setup mode, which is great), however, when actually booting into windows, windows will just sit there and get nowhere (at the Windows XP screen, with the small graphical bar). Safe mode is no help, unfortunately. I did a little experimenting, and I could get windows to boot off the drive when it was on the onboard controller. Whenever I try and add my Ultra 133 to the system, however, it exhibits this problem. I've tried pulling out all my other hardware to troubleshoot this. In an act of desparation, I deleted the existing ultra.sys in my windows\system32\drivers directory. I did this outside of windows so it wouldn't 'catch' the deletion and restore the file.. yay, windows is booting.. until it tries to add the drivers - then things get wierd.. I have a copy of the drivers in my \drivers\ultra folder, and have pointed to that folder in winnt.sif. My main question (such a long post for a short question) is - has anyone ran into problems like this before? I'm not sure at this point if it's the driver integration killing it, or something else. So far, i've not actually tested my xpcreate CD on this particular system, so i don't know if removing the ultra drivers from the image will fix it (I'm going to test this tomorrow however). I have used my xpcreate cd for several machines at work, with no problems - however, none of them had the ultra 133 card. The other concern/question i had was - on XPCreate's site, he talks about making sure you use the latest -digitally- signed drivers for your sata/raid card. I cannot find any such creature on promise's website, even though he lists promise as a tested card. Am I missing something? Are the ones on their website digitally signed, and they just don't say it? My next test will be to remake the disk without the sata/raid drivers - I won't be able to test that on my machine until tomorrow night, however. Any insight the XPCreate Gurus can offer would be excellent. [edit] - Just thought I would add - this is using the latest xpcreate, and not the version currently in testing. I might give that a shot after i get this problem resolved, however..

I have successfully used an XPCreate Image to create a RIS baseline install. I haven't updated it recently, however, so I'm not sure if any of the new patches would cause this problem. My baseline was 4/22/04 IIRC. You say you're extracting from the ISO? Are you actually extracting from an ISO image, or do you have a CD that you're copying from? Any chance you can just copy or use XPCreate's CDROOT folder? (bypassing the make/extract process). Have you been able to use that ISO image / CDROm to actually install XP? Just shooting out some ideas that come to the top of my head.

Reanimotolog has a 'dynamic file linker' on his web site that will optimize the image for use with mkisofs to do what you're after. I ran into the same problem with cdimage and isolinux.bin. Keep in mind, I've never tried Reanimatolog's program, so I don't know how well it works. I ended up going with CDShell. It has ISOlinux support, as well as diskem1x. Reanimato's page - http://bootcd.narod.ru/index_e.htm - scroll down to "duplicate files linker" CdShell - if you're interested, can be found at http://www.cdshell.org

Still Waiting on my Boss's Approval for one for me, then we'll talk about getting you one.

Sorry I didn't reply much sooner to this - haven't been on the forums in a while. I use a local copy of my xp cd's as my source. I put the CMPNENTS directory at the same level as my I386 directory. (IE, if I do a dir, I see CMPNENTS, I386, DOCS, SUPPORT, VALUEADD, etc). I don't know if using a XP Pro CD will do the trick, however. Look at your txtsetup.sif to make sure it references the tabletpc.cab file - I use my XP Tablet CD for both XP Pro and XP Tablet installs - it figures out whether or not to copy the tablet files based on the product key you enter.

Yay.. it worked.. I'll post a reply in 2kcreate as to my exact config.

I was having problems with 2k and the freezing after installing IE6 (would just get stuck at the blue background screen). After reading through some other posts in this forum, I determined it was one of the updates I was using. There was a script to take care of it all, but it involved using the runonceex key and a fair amount of work. I got it working by moving a few files into a hotfix directory, and uisng guirunonce to run the following patches. Q832483 (mdac) js56nen.exe KB837009 Q831167 I had Q330994 in the list, but that one was coming up with a "you don't have OE6 installed" error.. I took it out, and it turned out I didn't even need it. I took out js, 837009, and 831167 trying to narrow down the lockup. I'm pretty sure it was the mdac update at this point, but I don't feel like re-building, and then reinstalling with VM. well.. maybe one more run. I think I'll try and put those back in and see how well it works.. will post more details later. If I come up with a completely functioning install, I'll post the updates I have in which directories, and what I resorted to using guirunonce for. Edit - reading the post, one might infer I was actually running all those updates actually FROM the guirunonce key. I actually launch a hotfix.cmd file to launch them one at a time, followed by qchain. I never bothered posting LOG files as the creation process went perfectly fine, it was only after everything finished installing that the problems started.

Excellent.. Thank you very much.

For those that care (I noticed 10 whole views) This does work with XPCreate. You need to copy the files from the 2nd CD for it to work right, however.. Just put them one level up (just like they are on the CD). There is One critical update after doing it this way. Java VM or something like that. I had the KB number but forgot it. I do remember that you could not download it from microsoft's web site, had to do it through Windows Update. Still, pretty good for an unattended install. Now if I can just get 2k to work right.