How I made XP3 slipstream in a virtual machine

[skierpage]

There are several reports that if you run nLite under Vista or Windows 7 to slipstream SP3, then when you try to repair or install Windows with your nLite CD, setup will not accept valid product keys. The underlying Microsoft slipstream command behaves differently in Vista and Windows Server 2008.

This was certainly the case for me trying to make a slipstreamed SP3 from my XP Home SP1a disk by running nLite in Vista. The workaround suggested (replacing PIDGEN.DLL) didn't work for me. I had to make the disk running nLite in actual XP. I did this by recreating XP in a virtual machine. The nifty thing is you can test your nLite .iso by upgrading or repairing the virtual machine without burning a CD. Here are the steps I performed:

1. download VirtualBox 3
   
2. follow the excellent VirtualBox User manual to install it in Kubuntu Linux and create a virtual machine for Win XP
   
3. set up my CD-ROM drive as the virtual machine's CD-ROM drive, "booted" it with my XP SP1a disk in the CD-ROM, and installed XP SP1
   
4. install nLite in the Win XP virtual machine; I had to download MSI and various Windows updates just to run nLite
   
5. install the VirtualBox Guest Additions in the Win XP virtual machine so I could share a folder
   
6. run nLite to slipstream SP3 (and add the VIA SATA host driver, ^%#@ Microsoft). But I was now running nLite under XP, not in Vista
   
7. create the nLite .iso disk image "outside" the Win XP virtual machine in the shared folder
   
8. set up that .iso as the virtual machine's CD-ROM drive, restart the virtual machine and perform a Repair installation of the Win XP virtual machine from the .iso.
   
9. that worked! so I had some confidence that a physical nLite disk would work to repair my physical Win XP partition.
   
10. burn the .iso to a physical CD-RW (I used k3b in Kubuntu)
    

I hope this helps someone. I think the steps for running VirtualBox under Windows are almost identical. Perhaps I should have disabled networking for most of these steps, I'm not sure how unsafe it is to run an unpatched Windows XP in a virtual machine.

I have to say that having a boot CD or Live USB of a recent Linux distro around is incredibly useful even for Windows users. You can reliably boot most hardware from it, run partition repair programs, easily do byte-for-byte copies of MBRs and entire partitions with `dd`, mount and examine your Windows partitions, and even install new utility programs such as `TestDisk` which was the only program that found and recreated my trashed partitions.