DMahalko

It's very simple why I can't use nLite. The images are to be used in a school / corporate environment, which is against the nLite licensing rules. , The specific problem I am seeing is with many newer Dell computers, like the Optiplex GX360 and 960. These use the "Intel Matrix Storage Manager" for SATA and RAID (iastor.sys). If you have no traditional floppy drive wired with a 34-pin cable to the floppy connector on the motherboard, you can't get XP setup to find the install files. USB keys don't work and USB floppy drives don't work. As you may have noticed with the prevalence of 2+ gig USB memory sticks, floppy drives are now an utterly obsolete technology to include in a new school or business computer, but leaving it out makes the initial XP install extremely difficult since when XP first came out floppies were standard in every machine. I was pressed for time this past summer doing a school upgrade, so I had bought a single new Dell 960 with a floppy drive, to create the XP image for another 200 to be ordered a little later without floppy drives. I suspect the floppy drive in this one machine might never get used again after finishing my initial XP install of the Intel Matrix Storage Manager. , The manual driver installation method still leaves me with a problem: the CD is not bootable. The process: 1. XPSP2 CD, copy entire CD to a temp folder on hard drive 2. Manually slipstream XP3 into temp folder 3. Manually add Intel Matrix Storage Manager into temp folder 4. Make a data CD from temp folder... Oh the CD won't boot, so this does not work.

(Found this discussion via a google search for c_20127.nls) Unfortunately this NLS error continues to occur, with all the latest XP SP3, Sysprep, and nLite software. It seems that for the latest and greatest hardware that lacks a floppy drive, it is next to impossible to install a SATA hard drive controller driver via the normal Windows XP setup process, and therefore next to impossible to install XP in place of Vista. XP text-setup cannot recognize USB flash drives as a source of drivers, nor can it recognize USB keyboards which are not being managed by the BIOS, since the XP text-setup is not a full-fledged plug 'n play hardware environment. XP text-setup also doesn't seem to like USB floppy drives either if the system BIOS isn't handling the device. Short of hanging a floppy drive out the side of the computer in question there is virtually no way to install XP on a newer computer without driver support for the SATA storage device included within the XP boot image. , nLite appears to be the only option available in this situation, since only nLite offers the capability to preinstall textsetup device drivers into a custom, bootable Windows XP image. Microsoft apparently does not want anything to do with XP anymore so there will be no changes to XP text-setup, for storage driver installations from devices other than the nonexistent drive a: in newer computers. , If anyone can suggest an alternate Microsoft-approved driver-preinstall option for XP I would love to try it. The most logical option is to build a sysprep image on another computer, and somehow preinstall the text-mode driver into that image before applying it to the new computer. But it does not appear possible to preinstall a text-setup driver for hardware which does not exist in the source computer that is providing the sysprep image for the target machine. Note that trying to install a storage driver via Sysprep \i386\$OEM$ does NOT work because the image fails to even start up, due to a catch-22 lack of storage drivers when the sysprepped image kicks off on the new hardware. It never even gets to the point of running sysprep text-setup without a STOP 7B - inaccessible boot device. - Dale Mahalko