First off I wanted to say that I feel somewhat bad asking this question because I know that if I just look at the CD I could probably figure the out for myself but I keep forgetting to look when I am at home. Now I am at work and I almost feel I cannot get any more work done until I figure this out. I don't know why it is driving me to nutty.

I just purchased a new Dell that came with WinXP Pro SP1. I was wondering if anybody knew how these restore CD's worked? Do they work in a similar way that a normal unattended CD does or is it more like putting an image onto the machine.

I would like to take this CD and remove most, but not all of the software they have included. Like removing AOL, modem utils, etc. I would also like to slipstream SP2.

Does anybody know if this is possible?

If I decide to just create a different unattended CD, what origional media do I need to use to create the CD from? Because the license key that I have is an OEM license so if I create the CD with media from either volume license or retail it won't work right?

Thank you all for your help.

-Matt

It's definitely possible to slipstream SP2 into the CD, but not as it came to you. I wanted to slipstream SP2 into a new Dell OEM CD with SP1a for Home Edition.

Most likely, the disk will include pre-SP2 hotfixes which you will need to delete and clean out from the I386 folder. (If you try to slipstream SP2 into the CD as it is, the installation program will not allow you to do it.) Just follow the rules from the old pre-SP2 unattended guide in reverse (delete reference to updates in svcpack.inf, delete reference to updates in dosnet.inf, delete the files from the installation CD, and clean out whatever else makes the Windows installation install the updates).

As far as most of the other trash that Dell puts on new computers, the stuff is actually not on the Windows reinstallation CD, but on other CD's that come with the computer. AOL isn't on the computer as far as I could tell; I could be wrong, however.

An interesting side note to the Dell OEM CD's I've seen (this includes a Gold version of Professional from 2001 and the aforementioned SP1a version of Home Edition) - Dell creates a winnt.sif file on the CD, and prepopulates the Product Key in the winnt.sif file. When you do a fresh installation, you do not need to enter the product key OR activate the installation. It appears like the same product key is used for any computer coming from Dell with that version of Windows installed (every computer with Gold version of Professional has the same product key actually on the computer), from what I've seen through the computers I've worked on. Does that mean that Dell OEM CD's are actually volume license key CD's?

@jrf2027

Those aren't volume license editions. They use something called SLP, which is only offered to OEMs. More details on SLP here - http://www.windows-help.net/WindowsXP/activation.html.