We have a limited number of different types of hardware that we will be using my auto-install CD on.

However, no matter what, when you first boot the build process, windows goes through and attempts to load drivers for all kinds of different hardware. This takes a long time, and I would imagine also chews up some disk space.

Can some of these drivers be elliminated, to speed up the install?

Where would I begin?

nLite lets you remove some of those. I'm not sure if it removes all of them (it might). But you can still remove any leftover drivers and corresponding entries from the I386\txtsetup.sif file manually using notepad. I prefer notepad++ because it has color coding for MS-INI files. It's just easier to read.

Just be aware that every driver has several references. To completely remove that driver manually, you'd need to remove all these entries. You could also delete the files from your source, but they're small (~10 to ~65Kb) and don't take up that much space. I'll use the Qlogic QLA1280 PCI SCSI Adapter for an example. Here's all the references for it in WinXP SP2's txtsetup.sif

[SourceDisksFiles]
ql1280.sys = 1,,,,,,4_,4,1,,,1,4

[HardwareIdsDatabase]
PCI\VEN_1077&DEV_1280&SUBSYS_00061077 = "ql1280"
PCI\VEN_1077&DEV_1280&SUBSYS_01068086 = "ql1280"

[SCSI]
ql1280   = "Qlogic QLA1280, 64 bit PCI LVD SCSI HBA"

[Map.SCSI]
ql1280   = "QL1280"

[SCSI.Load]
ql1280 = ql1280.sys,4

Removing just one of these entries will probably just break setup. I think at a minimum you must remove the entries in [sCSI.LOAD] and [sourceDisksFiles], and maybe [Map.SCSI]. To be complete, you should remove all entries for each driver you remove. Like I said earlier, I think nLite can get rid of most of these (if not all) with a few clicks. XP only loads about 35 SCSI drivers during setup, so if there are any remaining, it shouldn't be too hard to find them and clean them up. Be sure to back up the txtsetup.sif file before you begin any manual editing. nLite won't hurt it, but it's pretty picky about extraneous spaces and line breaks. Hope that helps a little.

Kel

Edited April 24, 200719 yr by kelaniz