a_username2

Hi! First time here, 1st time user- sorry if I missed this somewhere in a faq. I am working w/ a vaio v505bl laptop, win xp home. This laptop did not come w/ a real 'winxp home' installation disc- only 2 'factory default restore' discs [Edit: Sony calls these 'Recovery Media Kit' -- http://esupport.sony.com/EN/osmig/xpclean.html]. The discs are: 1 cd - booter, looks like some kind of winxp 'safe-mode style' shell-launcher, and 1 dvd - containing lots of crap- sony software crud, etc. I've copied those 2 'factory default restore' disks onto hard drive, into separate directories. Both contain I386 subdirs. Running nLite-1.4.6, upon selection of either major directory, nLite reports message: "Make sure that the selected folder or drive contains the 'i386' or 'AMD64' directory and proper Windows installation files. nLite is for a pre-install..." ... and refuses to let me past this selection window. I guess neither has the set of 'proper Windows installation files [Edit: at least as far as nLite is concerned-- the discs definitely contain what is necessary to re-install windows]'? Am I going to have to go buy winxp home? [Edit: is there a way I can take my existing windows install & use that, somehow? Like boot into safe mode, copy the \windows directory into where nLite can use it?] Fwiw, appended is a screenshot of the i386 directory on the dvd: