Slipstream drivers! N-Lite! Driverpacks.net – cool!

Ran into an interesting, fun thing recently; saw this in MaximumPC once, but didn’t really care as I didn’t think I’d need to use it, but just did it recently and found it a lot of fun.

Anyways, this all started when Windows XP was unable to find the hard disk on a new laptop I had to install it on. (The laptop came preinstalled with Vista, but since Vista sucks, we wanted XP on it.) It took forever for us to figure it out. We probably should’ve just bought a USB floppy from eBay or something, but slipstreaming seemed interesting and would’ve been a cool challenge.

There are various links that help out in the process. Here they are:
1) N-Lite – I used N-Lite to build the cd and strip out the garbage I didn’t need. Make sure you put the disk controller drivers in txt mode opposed to pnp. It will only work if you slipstream them.
http://www.nliteos.com/download.html
2) Driverpacks – here’s where you can get almost every driver you’ll ever need:
http://www.driverpacks.net/
You can find slipstreaming instructions here:
http://forum.driverpacks.net/viewtopic.php?id=1449
3) Windows Offline Update – I used this to grab my security patches and hotfixes. You can integrate them right into N-Lite, so you have a faster installation.
http://www.heise.de/ct/projekte/offlineupdate/
4) DriverMagician – this is one of my old favorites – it only works after you’ve got the correct drivers installed, but I like to use it to backup my drivers.
http://www.drivermagician.com/

That’s about it. With that, you can build your own install cd or dvd and strip stuff out, make tweaks to the registry, change the installer, so that it looks like you’re installing Windows 2000, etc. It didn’t help in installing all of the drivers that I wanted, but for the most part, things worked. I’ve yet to test it on a physical machine as I did it only in a VM. The laptop I did just with slipstreaming the Intel SATA controller driver.