patwa

Hello, It's been about 18 months since I dabbled with unattended installs, the one I did then has worked since without a hitch but now it's time for the system to have a clean up, format and re-install. Unfortunately I don't have the image which I made then, and in any case I could probably do better anyway so I'm back to working from scratch. At this point I'd like to thank all the people who have contributed to making this possible, the work and research which you have put into it, not to mention setting aside the time is awesome, and very much appreciated. That having been said, I'm a bit unsure where to start. I've of course run nLite on a retail XP Pro SP2 CD, but now am unsure about just which route to take to slim down the install further. I'm after more space on the CD, but also after a faster install time (the last one was 9 minutes start to finish + about 5 mins for applications). I have read many posts about people installing the full retail windows, then slimming it down, but unfortunately I don't have a spare system to play with to do that, so I'm trying to slim down the install CD, then put my apps on and then run that as the setup. I would appreciate tips on what steps to follow next. I've seen lists of files that are safe to remove (actually it was the list of the Windows\System32 folder but I could probably find the files on the CD) , should I go that way and remove them or is there a safer and more efficient way to do the strip down? Of course, no project is worthwile without a clear purpose (sorry, the software developer in me talking here), so here goes. The overall goal is a stable and functional system with the best possible performance, by removin all components that could slow it down. I'm happy to install applications to replace components not installed (for example, I'll install Photoshop instead of paint, Windows Live instead of Windows Messenger, and so on). The particular system I'm doing this for connects via Ethernet to a router, so no wireless functionality is needed. It also doesn't have any TV card or firewire utilities. It's mainly a work and surf machine, not a gamer, although it does have an AGP graphics card. I would also be putting IE7 in, although this could be slipstreamed or installed post-setup. I would appreciate some direction here, my session.ini is included from nlite for reference. Thanks. H. Last_Session.ini

I apologise if this has been posted elsewhere, but hopefully it will help other members in similar situations. Since the introduction of SATA and associated RAID configurations, it has been necessary in a large number of cases to use a floppy disk to load drivers for these devices and associated onboard controllers via a floppy disk when installing the Windows Operating System (2000/XP). This is because Microsoft, in their infinite wisdom, did not provide even basic drivers for SATA and RAID chipsets, as they have done for video and sound. Not only is this highly inconvenient due to the need to have a floppy disk drive, which many new computers and indeed most new laptops now don't ship with, it has also caused major and frequent problems with drivers not being recognised by Windows Setup, resulting in the infamous "Setup cannot copy the file xxx" error message. An example of this is with the VIA SATA/RAID drivers, and in particularly the viamraid.sys file. Search Google for viamraid.sys and you'll find many forums with many posts from members desperate to find a way to install these drivers which Windows simply will not accept. Fortunately, or maybe its just co-incidence and already known (although I only saw this method posted on one forum), there is a way around it that a) does not require a floppy disk, and B) will allow you to install windows without difficulty. If you download the nLite application from www.nliteos.com and then run it, you will see, after initially clicking 'Next' and specifying the source for you Windows XP installation, and option to 'Integrate Drivers'. You can then use this to 'slipstream' the drivers for your SATA/RAID controller into the actual Windows installation, meaning that Windows will instinctually use them without complaint, and without asking you for them. Note that you will need to copy the contents of your Windows installation CD to your hard drive before using the above method, as well as the drivers for your SATA/RAID controller. i strongly recommend you use the latest driver from your motherboard chipset manufacturer, and NOT those that came with the board, as these will be newer and will have had fixes integrated into them to resolve any faults/problems. This is particularly importnat in the case that you have a VIA chipset on your motherboard. nLite will automatically, once you've pointed it to the SATA/RAID drivers, detect them as TEXTMODE drivers. This simply means that they're used in the initial part of Setup, and before anything gets copied to the hard drive - after all, one needs a drive to be present before you can copy files to it! You can just go ahead, click OK, then 'Next' and 'yes' to apply the changes. After this is done, and nLite has done its thing, you will need to convert the folder where you copied the Windows installation CD files to into a bootable ISO. Don't worry, nlite can do this, simply go back into the application and select 'Make Bootable ISO' and follow the instructions there. You can then burn this ISO to CD and use it to install Windows as normal. I know this is a rather basic guide to doing the slipstreaming, but more information on using nLite can be found on their website www.nliteos.com and on their forum, or indeed here at MSFN. If there's anything I've omitted here or mistakenly got wrong, please feel free to correct me. Happy installing, and enjoy the freedom of non-floppy computing! Hussein.

Hi and thanks for that. I'll try it and see if it works. Cheers. Hussein.

Hi. You're not alone with your problem: http://www.msfn.org/board/index.php?showto...78566&st=30 It seems that there are conflicts when using different integration methods in conjunction with nLite. Firstly, i would only use nLite to integrate your drivers. Secondly, it seems as though when you then remove drivers using nLite, this causes problems. third, I'm surprised by the mention in that thread I linked to about the references to the files not being removed by nLite. This seems a bit of an oversight just from a newbie's prospective. Try the integration with the driverpacks, but don't remove anything that is in the default WinXP. Then try it. If that works (which it should as hopefully windows will use the newer drivers instead of the older defaults) then that may well be it. Unless of course you're actually looking to reduce install size, in which case I'm not sure what can be done if it is indeed the removal of the drivers that's causing the problem, due to files being removed from drivers.cab but the references remaining present. Hussein.

Hi. I know this goes against the 'normal' method of doing this, but it worked for me so thought I'd post it. I don't know if using this process messes up the installs for other programs/drivers, but I used nLite to slipstream the SATA/RAID drivers into my XP setup and it worked fine. nLite does create an $OEM$ folder, which indicates it should work fine and co-exist with the rest of your setup. Go into nLite, select the Integrate Drivers option, select insert then Multiple Files, point to the folder containing your drivers, OK, then select the drivers for your Operating system (mine were the VIA drivers, I actually only had the option for Server 2003 drivers but these worked fine). nLite then automatically selects the TEXTMODE setup parameters, select Next, then Yes to apply changes. I would suggest you use the latest drivers for the chipset that your SATA controller is based on. i found thatthe motherboard drivers for the controller tend to be out of date, and mine just didn't work at all. I have a VIA chipset, so used VIA drivers. If you have an SIS chipset, use SIS drivers straight from SIS. Hope this works, and I apologise if I've upset the apple cart with this method. Hussein.

Just as a follw-up, the current Nvidia Drivers sem to be the forceware v91. the international version is nearly 60Mb. It mentions a lot of features I know my card doesn't have. are these still the correct drivers to use? Does Nvidia just have one driver for all its Geforce cards, and jst add features for the newer cards as they come out? Hussein.

Hi and thanks for your post. I'm now using nLite to slipstream my drivers, and have done this with the SATA drivers successfully. However, when I come to do the same with the graphics card drivers, I have two notable drivers, an Asus one and an Nvidia one. It doesn't seem to like it when I put in both, so am going to try just the latest Nvidia drivers from the nvidia website. Do I need any other drivers? I mean, if I reove the default Microsoft Display Drivers, will that effect anything? I know when I came to install the sound card, if I removed the sound drivers from the CD and just put in the ones for the sound chip on my motherboard (CMedia 9761), it complained that it couldn't find various files. So I do wonder. Hussein.

Hi. Sorted the viamraid.sys problem. Will post in a new thread as I think this could be useful to a lot of people, and it'll save them trawling through posts to find it. Two problems now: 1. After install, DVD/CD drives are not detected. Not listed in My Computer or Device Manager. 2. I cannot access C:\ or any other drive through the Run prompt. I think whichever component maps drive letters to drives was removed. Can anyone help with this please? Hussein.

Hi and thanks for the reply. Sorry! Should have remembered the config file Anyways, I burned the same ISO + stripped down onto a new disc, and now practically every file has an error. So I suspect there is some corruption somewhere, also that the original disc (where I was copying the files from) is corrupt. I'm going to get a new disc (more money to Microsoft but oh well) and try again. Config attached. Hussein. Last_Session__2006.08.24_01.25.21_.ini

Hi there. I'm having a problem with the VIA Raid Driver (viamraid.sys) which will copy over fine when using the normal Windows XP CD but not with the stripped down version. I cannot work out which dependencies I'm removing that could be causing this problem. When using the stripped down version (on CD-RW but that's never mattered in the past) it gets to just past the format drive stage before a message comes up saying it can't copy viamraid.sys. The components I'v removed from the stripped down version were using nLite, where I removed all languages, keyboards, accessories, some network tools, and things like system restore, security center, etc. Any help appreciated. I'd rather have a quick installtion of XP that was clean to start with then have to install the full version and then use XPLite or similar to remove components. Cheers. Hussein.

Thanks. The mass of information this guy has put together is frankly astounding. I'm going to install the nlite'd version of WinXP Pro I have now, then run some batch files later. Should be able to clear a good 30-50MB of space. I need the OS running, but I do intend to remove a lot of the files from the distribution itself, then burn that to CD. Cheers. Hussein.

Hi all. I'm looking to strip my winXP down further than it already is. A while back, I came across a pretty damned long list of additional files that could be removed, over and above the list of components given in nLite. I remember these files were all non-dependent and safe to remove for about 99% of the installations out there, no matter what else was removed. but now I can't find it. Was wondering if anyone know of such a list and if so, could you point me to it? I'm not at all familiar with XP at the individual file level, and therefore don't just want to willy-nilly start removing things. Thanks a lot in advance for your help. Cheers. Hussein.

Done the first stage of the strip, nlite'd the install and used the list of files in the post linked above, and it's now at 172MB. I've edited the ost, and you can see hat I've done so far, last session components.ini shows the components removed, and last session.ini shows the individual files removed. Honestly, I'm pretty fired up about this, of course my whole ambition is to get a cd/dv that will install the system the wy I want it to, tweaks, apps and customizations, and a small, lightweight windows is just the key, not to mention making things faster and giving it a smaller footprint. There is still a major stumbling block re: the asrock sata/raid drivers that just will not work, and as a result I'm still having to use the DefaultHide unattended mode, but I can sort that out later to make it truly unattended. Also, as you can see, I don't have much use for the windows applications or many of the functions, apart from the AccessibilityOptions, those I haven't removed are due to me either not knowing what they do, or because they might affect my wifi network operation. Going to start work on the apps now. BTW, anyone know whether, if I remove components from the office install source, can I still install them from the original CD later if I need them - e.g themes, wizards, etc. Also, any alternative to Office Shrinker stickied here on this forum that doesn't need a clean system to work? Cheers. Hussein.

Thank you. Will work through stripping some of the .dlls and files from that thread. Am also going to re-nlite my xp install, as I had removed some of the hardware functionality, actually I only need to remove the drivers and replace them with my own, no point removing the hardware as it'll just cause problems later. But a 10.4MB drivers.cab seems great to me anyway. Really keep to get this off the ground, and if we can get this down to say, 150MB or less but still with the wi-fi and internet functionality that'll be brilliant! Working on stripping office 2003 pro now, it's a real shame that the only utility out there that does it the shrink_lang.exe requires a clean install, as I'll have to format my other machine to do it. VPC isn't working for me and I don't know if I can do it on a VM Workstation. anyone know of any other office strippers? The main problem I have is deciding what to remove. For example, I'd like to remove the thrmes and wizards and clipart, but don't know if I'll need them in the future, lol. Same with the Help files. Hussein.

Right, with all this time on my hands I decided to start a new project. With the success of my first unattended setup, albeit that Installshield wouldn't work so couldn't get the belkin wifi card to install, I've decided to start again, but to increase the complexity this time. First off, I'm starting by getting windows as small as possible without removing the main functionality I need. the main thing that seems to be causing some problems is which components I can remove, but still maintain wireless network and internet use. So far I've got the XP Install CD (Just the CD, no additions) down to 172MB with a 10.4MB Drivers.cab file. Here's what's been done so far (see attached file) I also removed the Compdata, Lang, win9xmig, win9xupg and winntupg folders. I'm a fairly competent computer user, but have not had much experience with editing system files or registry entries. Doesn't mean I'm not up to the challenge though! So, can anyone suggest how we can get this install slimmed down any further? The successful, well sort of, install I did earlier was 300MB and felt really light at that point. BTW, where is the option to disable hibernation and the pagefile? Is that under Unattended? Also, I can't seem to be able to get my Asrock RAID/SATA drivers to install at the 'Press F6 for third party drivers' part of setup, so I've been restricted to DefaultHide for the Unattended mode. This is going to be some whopping great install, I can just feel it! Hussein. Last_Session_components.ini Last_Session.ini