Curmudgeon

I reverted the Sony laptop to Sony's OEM XP Pro (from Sony's OEM Vista Business) using the Recovery DVDs provided with the laptop. I then wanted to install the Windows Recovery console with XPSP3. Creating a slipstreami of XPSP2 with SP3 from a retail XPSP2 CD and downloaded SP3 was easy. Installing the Windows Recovery Console was easy. However, when attempting to access the Recovery Console, I would get a BSOD. Eventually realized that the retail XP Pro distribution did not include the necessary HDD drivers. The laptop (like most newer PCs) does not have a floppy drive so F6 can't be used to load third party drivers. I tried to manually incorporate the required SATA Driver (Intel) (Non-Raid) and Sony HDD Protection Driver into the slipstream with little success (just a techie-wannabe). Found a reference to nLite and gave it a try. Problem solved. Sony includes as part of its OEM XP image the necessary "uninstalled" drivers in C:\windows\drivers. I simply included the two drivers noted above when running nLite. I then installed the Windows Recovery Console from the resulting XPSP3 slipstream. The Windows Recover Console loaded ( no BSOD ) -- and I was able to run a thorough CHKDSK from the Recovery Console. Many thanks to nuhi for creating nLite.