dwalker59

Yes, you're right, I was wrong about Sysprep. The Driver Injection GUI program *looks* great, but it gives me an error loading the offline System hive... along the lines of "unable to parse the System hive". I know I pointed to the right hive file... I don't build large numbers of computers, so I had not looked at Sysprep, but twice recently I have replaced a failing IDE drive in a working system with a new SATA drive. Well, once recently and then once coming up this week. :-) The one I replaced last weekend magically worked after I cloned the IDE disk to a SATA disk! No blue screen. The BIOS was kind of confusing; it seemed to know that the SATA drive was a SATA drive, but there were contradictions in two places. It asked whether I wanted SATA RAID mode or IDE mode in one place... if I selected SATA RAID mode, I then couldn't select that drive as a boot disk at all, which is weird. (It was an MSI K9M6PGM2, and the manual is pretty sparse on the CMOS description.) So I said I wanted the SATA disk in IDE mode. BUT, once booted, the boot disk shows up in device manager as a SATA disk, and the controller shows up as a SATA controller. I'm doing the same thing on a different board later this week, so we'll see what happens. I just wish that the Driver Injection GUI had not failed for me. The forums for that tool are pretty sparse, and the tool is in beta, so maybe I should learn more about sysprep. I wish nLite would add drivers to a running system!

It looks like the Driver Injection program is what I need. Thanks for the help! I'll report back in a few days, after I have time to test. Thanks much, I appreciate the help.

nLite has NOTHING to do with the "installed" system? I disagree! if nLite didn't put the drivers in the right place, then the drivers wouldn't end up in the right place on the "installed" system, and the installed system wouldn't boot! It seems like the nLite creators have to know where the drivers end up on the installed system, in order to know how to correctly integrate them into the install CD. (I might be incorrect, but that was my hope.) I'll look at the links you provided. But for Offline Sysprep, and even for nLite, I am hoping to NOT have to reinstall on this currently-running system. I know what Sysprep does; it is broadly similar to nLite as far as driver integration goes. Thanks. David Walker

First, nLite is great, and I know how to integrate text-mode SATA drivers into an install CD image. I have a slightly different but related question that the people here surely know the answer to... My underlying question is, "Where (on disk) do the drivers for the boot device (boot disk) ultimately end up, on a working XP system, *after* the "F6" or nLite integrated installation from CD?" I am considering moving a working XP installation from an IDE drive to a SATA drive. After I move all of the data, do I *have* to do a Repair reinstall, or can I get the drivers and INF files for the boot device into the right place(s) before copying all of the data? (Side note: I am comfortable with system installs, and I know there are several ways to clone the disk. My preference is XXClone, so those are not really my questions.) Searching Google for "how to move XP from IDE to SATA" gives articles that talk at length about how to integrate the text-mode drivers into an install CD, and the topics also talk about doing a repair reinstall after cloning. But it seems that since some of you *must* know where the files end up on disk, on the running system, after the install: when you start from a working system on an IDE drive, it should be possible to put the SATA drivers in the right place before cloning the disk. I predict that the entry in boot.ini needs to be changed to the SCSI syntax instead of the IDE syntax also. Thanks. I appreciate any insight into this. [bTW, how is the system able to read the disk driver from the disk in the first place? THAT seems like a circular problem.] David Walker

If you use nLite to integrate SP3 into a Windows XP Pro installation, and make no other changes (no features are removed) and burn a CD from that, and install Windows from that CD, is SFC /scannow expected to work? Does it need the original CD? I used nLite to integrate SP3 into Windows XP Pro (from a CD which has an OEM version of Windows XP + SP2). After I did that, there were some weirdnesses happening, so I decided to run SFC /scannow just for fun. I didn't have the CD handy, so I tried to point SFC to the folder where I had copied the entire installation CD to. SFC said that was not a valid Windows installation. Is this expected to work? I also tried mucking around in the registry entries that point to the install source, and I set the CDInstall (whatever it's called) to zero, with no luck. Is this supposed to work, or does nLite make SFC never work again? Thanks. LAST_SESSION.INI