Cheetah

Dang John, you really know your way around this stuff haha. I got it working yesterday, my issue was DHCP Client for the network. I got confused and was setting it up for my old ISP that didn't use DHCP. I'm not using an upgrade disk, you're correct. Using an old SP3 disk I bought when my other laptop fried while I was overseas a couple Christmas's ago. Good money spent there, never successfully used it until now haha Thanks again for all of your help, everyone. I'm on XP right now and everything seems to be working, hopefully I don't turn up any glitches in the next few days putting it through the ringer.

Thanks for the help folks. I started with a fresh disk and defeated my issues, now I can't get my LAN to work. haha Also, thanks for the heads up on activation, left the IE core intact just to save the headache. Maybe I'll try to crack it and rip the core out anyway...Is it illegal to crack software you legally own? haha Ponch, not sure what you mean by the upgrade disk.. John, thanks for the virtual system advice, I'll have to throw one on the windows side of my install and work from there until I get things right.

Format drive support was left alone, so that's not the issue. The mouse-over text on that one says it'll remove the option to right click and format drives like floppy disks or USB drives, so that shouldn't be the issue with hard drive formatting during the install anyway.

Thanks for the info, John. I did mouse over everything before selecting it for removal, and if I wasn't 100% sure about anything I wouldn't take it out. I haven't used Windows extensively in over 4 years, so I don't really remember exactly how it works, but I don't need to activate Windows if I'm not doing updates and such, do I? I'd like to strip the IE core because I certainly see no use for having it, but if it's something that I can't just get rid of I'll have to rethink that option.. I'll try to dig out a fresh XP disk from the depths of my storage and try another go. Is there anything I should specifically avoid to retain the ability to format during install?

I'm starting with a full Pro SP3 build and trying to slim it down as much as possible, but with no prior experience with nLite. I used to know XP inside out, but have adopted a Mac and been loving it for years. I'm trying to reduce the footprint as much as possible on XP and remove pretty much everything I can. The only functionality I need to retain are USB drives, sound, and video with DirectX and OpenGL. I'm going to use it to play the game America's Army online, and quite possibly nothing else. Since it will be online I need to retain network abilities, but I've stripped out IE and the IE core, as I'll be using Opera. My problem is that when I'm doing the install, it doesn't give me an option to format the partition on my drive. When I choose a drive, where it usually affords the option to format NTFS or FAT, or retain the format that's already there - it skips that entirely and just goes directly to scanning the drive and installing on the format that's in place. Since I'm installing dual boot on my Mac laptop (MacBook Pro) I need to reformat that partition in order to make it work. Without reformatting at that point it will go through the install process up until the first reboot, it reboots and says "Press any key to boot from CD..." then reads "Disk Error\Press any key to restart" and doesn't respond to any inputs. I've successfully installed other builds of XP Pro without trouble, and I've narrowed the issue down to the inability to format. Like I said, I'm cutting out everything I possibly can, so is there a setting or combination of settings I need to leave alone in order to retain the ability to format the drive during install? Also, the SP3 build I'm basing off of has prior unattended install settings in place, so I chose not to mess with them, could it be something in those settings taking away my ability to format? I've got my Last Session.ini attached, is there any need for the Last Session_U.ini to be attached as well? Any help is GREATLY appreciated, so thank you in advance. LAST SESSION.INI