brill idea- no sense upon how to do it

[vincent]

right.. .i'm wondering whether it's possible if i could make my own Bootable XP CD disc with my own drivers on it... i'll give u a example of what i mean....

Old Time/Tiny PC's came with a so called "Backup Disc" which when crammed in, it Uses Norton Ghost to format the Partition-then Xp setup would continue-after all booted up- your drivers like sound ,GFX,ethernet and Chipset was installed and all u did was one reboot and it was all ready to go...

Im wondering whether i can do the exact same- but make my own from scratch -use Norton Ghost for the applicable Partition to Format, then have the XP setup run and install -then once booted up- have me drivers start installing and then the final reboot.....

Is it possible?

[Paul Adams]

You want to check out the following resources:
MSFN: Unattended Windows installation guide
MSFN: Unattended Windows forum - ask your questions here after searching the forum for answers first

You want to be looking at slipstreaming SP2, Windows hotfixes and your necessary drivers - I would recommend using a rewritable CD or DVD as it will take a few trial runs to get it right.
(And make sure you have all the data on the system backed up before you start.)

[aidanjt]

http://unattended.msfn.org/unattended.xp/ is a great place for making unattended Windows setup discs, you could also make a WinPE boot disk for low level disk stuff like partitions, defragging system files, and repairing corrupt files etc..

Its a good idea to test any disc like this in a virtual machine like VMware or MS Virtual PC before using on your main computer or you could just end up with a screwed up windows install.

[SourceQuench]

Running in a virtual machine is definitely recommended, especially when you have spend ages putting together a CD ony to find that a hotfix didn't get installed for some simple reason

[Paul Adams]

Virtual machines are a great way of testing home-brewed OS installations, but don't help for verifying 3rd party drivers got integrated okay.

I have produced a set of DVDs to auto-install all of my drivers and applications after the OS is installed, and had to recreate the discs a few times due to little issues that my virtual environment couldn't pick up on.

[Funkstar]

Vincent, instead of building a WinXP install CD you can build backup disks with things like Ghost etc. I have Acronis DiskDirector and TrueImage and one of them lets me back my system up to CD/DVD and will boot and resotore from these.

Having custom install disks as discussed above is great if you want to install it on other machines, but for disaster recovery i guess a backup image would be easier and quicker. Also you could take an image once a month or week and have everything the way you had it when you last ran the backup instead of being at a virgin state.