Unable To Reformat Partition During Install

[dramaley]

I'm working on a Windows XP Professional installation CD. I'm starting from a CD that has SP1 slipstreamed. To that i've used nLite to add SP2 and RyanVM's Update Pack 1.2. Also with nLite i've removed a number of components and set a few options and tweaks (if a list of these are necessary, i'd be happy to post them). Everything is working great, except for one little annoyance.

When booting from my original XP with SP1 CD, in the text mode portion of setup i can select an existing partition to install to, and then am given the option to either reformat the partition or to install over the existing installation. With my customized CD, that is no longer the case. I can't reformat an existing partition. If i select a partition to install to, it gives me the option of installing to a different folder, or quitting setup and rebooting the computer. Is there a way to restore the original functionality that would allow me to reformat an existing partition?

The customized installer will allow me to delete and then recreate a partition, and then format it, but that doesn't work in all cases. Specifically, it doesn't work if i have 2 existing partitions (1 and 2) and want to reformat partition 1 and install Windows to it. If i delete partition 1 and create a new partition, the new partition is created as partition 3 with a few MB of unpartitioned space at the beginning of the drive (so then the drive would contain: unallocated space, partition 3, then partition 2). The text mode install works fine, but when the computer reboots it says the drive isn't bootable. So i need a way to restore the original functionality that allows me to reformat an existing partition directly without having to delete and recreate it. Any ideas?

The file that seems most relevant to me is winnt.sif, which i am including below.

;
; Generated by nLite 0.99.8 beta 5
; Modified by Dan Ramaley
;

[Data]
	Autopartition = 0
	MsDosInitiated = 0
	UnattendedInstall = Yes

[Unattended]
	UnattendSwitch = Yes
	OemPreinstall = Yes
	OemSkipEula = Yes
	TargetPath = \Windows
	DriverSigningPolicy = Ignore
	Hibernation = No
	CrashDumpSetting = 0
	UnattendMode=DefaultHide

[SystemFileProtection]
	SFCQuota = 0

[GuiUnattended]
	AutoLogon = No
	TimeZone = 020
	OEMSkipRegional = 1
	OemSkipWelcome = 1

[Display]
	AutoConfirm = 1

[Components]
	Indexsrv_system = Off

[UserData]
	ProductKey = "XXXXX-XXXXX-XXXXX-XXXXX-XXXXX"
	OrgName = "My Organization"
	ComputerName = *

[RegionalSettings]
	LanguageGroup = 1
	Language = 0409

[Networking]
	InstallDefaultComponents = Yes

[Identification]
	JoinWorkgroup = WORKGROUP

[Shell]
	DefaultStartPanelOff = Yes

[purewaveform]

This may seem weird, but is the option to delete existing partion still on the screen? IF it is you could probably just delete and then recreate, then XP would have to do at lease a quick format.

[dramaley]

I do have the option to delete and recreate the partition, but as i mentioned that doesn't work if there are initially 2 partitions on the drive. When i delete and recreate partition 1 it isn't recreated correctly and when the installer reboots it can't boot from the hard drive.

I don't know why the option to reformat disappeared in my installer. Has anyone else had this problem when creating an image using nLite?

[UncleBuck]

Been asking the same....see my post Format...format partition

[dramaley]

After some trial and error (and a small pile of CD-Rs) i've found the problem and solution. When i was having trouble, i was running nLite multiple times on the same working directory. With each run i would select different tasks. If this way of building a CD seems strange, it was because it was my first time trying to modify an XP install CD, and i wanted to make sure it was working correctly after each extra change. So i started out with integrating SP2 and the extra patches, then went back and removed components, and later went back again and added a few options and tweaks. Between each run i'd burn a new CD and test. Everything seemed to work except for the weird inability to format existing partitions.

The solution to the problem is with each run of nLite to start with a clean working directory. Use nLite to copy the Windows CD to the directory and perform all other modifications in one run. Since making this change in my procedure, i haven't had any problems. I would think that it would be possible to run nLite a second time on the same working directory if all that is done is creating a new ISO; at least i hope so since there are some other modifications i want to make to the image before generating the ISO. I'll try generating a new ISO off the same working directory and report back if it doesn't work.

[dramaley]

I found another cause for this problem. After running nLite, you have to be careful modifying I386\WINNT.SIF. If you remove this line:

FileSystem = *

then you won't be able to format existing partitions. I'm not sure why that line matters, but it does. I've burned two CDs that are identical except for one has that line in WINNT.SIF, the other doesn't. And the one that has it works great, while the one that does not won't let me format existing partitions during the text-mode portion of the installer.