Fuzzy

Thanks for the help, guys. I'll do some more lurking and try to learn more. Funny thing, I have usually trusted the "experts" at http://www.windrivers.com/chat/chat.asp Chat Room. The other day, they were telling me that I needed to slipstream SP2 (not SP3, because it was impossible, but after further reading here, I know it is possible) but yesterday a few others said it was a terrible idea to slipstream with nLite and to just format the rest of the HD and live with it. *Sigh* Anyway, I'm at the point of near exhaustion. I just want to reinstall my HD to a point where the C: drive is at least 350 GB and I'll use the rest to partition and store my pictures and videos and stuff. So, I found a link to Gparted. I really appreciate all the help, fellas, but what I need right now is to increase the size of my C: drive with the least amount of work. nLite seems like a great piece of software that would be a must-have in the long-run. I will definitely use it, if not right now, some day, to create a streamlined installation disk for future use. I really don't mind spending a few more hours to slipstream nLite to SP3 and then manually installing all the other essential updates and add-ons and programs, but after reading so many posts and seeing how complicated it can be, would it be worth my time to just use the Gparted program? Again, thanks for your help, guys. I will get around to using nLite, if not now, in the future. I just don't have the time to learn the intricacies, at the moment. On the other hand, if anyone has used Gparted and has had problems with it, I'd like to know about that, too. I keep getting input from so-called "experts" who do nothing but confuse me. EDIT: Oh yeah, one guy (supposedly a network admin) said that if I used nLite or Gparted, advised that I might be voiding my warranty on my HD, since it would have been "modified". Anybody know if that's true or not?

Hello, ladies and gentlemen. I've lurked around here for a little while but I really need to get my system back to working order again. I have just suffered (another) hard drive failure, this one being a Western Digital Caviar Blue 500 GB drive that lasted all of ten months (so it's under warranty, hopefully). I just installed a Seagate Barracuda 500 GB drive and have Windows XP Pro installed. However, my XP disk is pre-SP1, so it only recognizes 127 GB. I really want all 500 GB of my drive unpartitioned, so I was told to check out nLite to slipstream SP2. Are there any super-newb-friendly guides or can someone quickly explain how I can do the following: Create an installation disk with SP2 slipstreamed (so it recognizes the entire drive), remove pesky Windows Messenger and umm...that's all I can think of at the moment. I just want an installation disk that I can use to install Windows XP Pro (while offline, of course) and manually install the rest of the drivers, antivirus, SP3, etc. Last question (and thanks for your patience), while lurking I saw a few people saying it was a bad idea to use nLite to create a disk from the same source disk more than once. Does that mean it's bad to create more than one nLite installation disk from one official Windows installation disk (I'm assuming "source" disk means the original Windows installation disk)? And, if I'm correct here, why is it bad? Thanks for the help and sorry for the long-ish first post.