F6'ing the WinXP Installation w/o floppy

Well... The first try of slipstreaming was unsuccessful. I even used my OEM version of the CD, but I guess the folders that I decided not to include (PRELOAD, etc.) actually have the drivers I need, because when I booted it up, it didn't find hard drives on my PC. It found my external USB drive, but didn't find my internal drive :(.

I tried looking for the drivers from the Intel website and all I could find was an installer for the "Intel Matrix Storage Manager". I tried extracting it, but it just gave me the setup files, not the actual drivers. Nothing on the OEM cd looks like drivers, everything is in file types I can't open/extract.

I am pretty sure that the Tablet PC edition is Professional SP2, because of this article.

I woke up a bit early this morning so I had time to play around with nLite again and make another image. It turns out the drivers for the SATA controller are ON the repair cd after all - (...i386/drv/scs). I slapped my forehead when I found them. It's not like they did a really good effor in hiding them. I don't know how I missed them the first time around.


I slippedstreamed those to the CD and what do you know, Windows was able to detect my internal hard drives. :) Now I haven't installed from the CD to complete the test, but that will happen very soon as well.

I feel cofident I am at the final stretch here, but I couldn't do it without your help. Special thanks to Bob Iroc and Ferrit.

Thanks again.

P.S.: I will post results one I make a test installation.

Thats great, good luck!!!

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Originally Posted by mduren

silly me but if your bios supports bootable usb like mine...why can't you make a thumb drive or an external hard drive bootable with the winxp setup and your sata drivers on it?

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so basically slipstreaming like we mentioned above?

This has been a truly interesting and informative thread! Got to learn about a couple of useful programs I was completely unfamiliar with, and that is always great. Still, I think I would have just coughed up $20 for a USB floppy drive. I have one for office use, and it has been handier than I ever expected.

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Originally Posted by slgrieb

This has been a truly interesting and informative thread! Got to learn about a couple of useful programs I was completely unfamiliar with, and that is always great. Still, I think I would have just coughed up $20 for a USB floppy drive. I have one for office use, and it has been handier than I ever expected.

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You are correct it has been a good one. :)
Now the 64,000 dollar question is
When the hell is microsoft going to realize we dont really use floppies at all?
Did they just have a brain fart after handing out all them usb sticks?
:guns:

XP is supposed to be the last version of Windows to require a floppy for any reason. But, yeah, you still have to wonder why MS didn't remove this limitation after W2K (well, even then!). I guess when your OS is shipping something like 2 years late, a few details fall through the cracks, eh?

Still the original release version of XP was so much more polished than either W2K or 98, I still hope that Vista may have it's act together when it launches. Now if MS could only give us a compelling reason to run the dang thing!

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Originally Posted by OMGmissinglink

If you could repair install and wanted to upgrade to pro you only had to insert your pro disk with windows running and choose upgrade. :mult:

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Because if you read the post he wanted a fresh install without all the extra crap that the OEM installs when using the restore disks.

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Originally Posted by OMGmissinglink

Teh no sata configuration, thus your laptop has sata drive running in pata mode.

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On what Basis are you saying his Hard Drive is running in pata mode? There is nothing that states that there. Just because his boot order doesn't have SATA in it doesn't mean it is automatically not in sata mode. All it says is "main harddrive".

[

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Originally Posted by OMGmissinglink

... As far as the other programs he did not want with the Laptop install disk window does include one handy tool unstall programs.

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Yes, but I am not about to spend a week to track all the registry keys directories and all the other crap that the programs have produced and the uninstakk routine "forgot" to delete :).

By the way, as you can see from the list of boot locations I posted, there is NO floppy drive option :). Of course that is not a surprise, since I don't have a floppy on my notebook. I still cant find the regular drivers on the intel website. I do not know why. Good thing they were on the repair CD.

One more thing... What is peta mode? And for the last time my laptop does need SATA controller drivers installed to find the hard drive. Why? Because when the drivers were not slipstreamed to the CD, it found NO hard drives to install to. And when ther drivers were slipstreamed to the CD, it DID find the drive. I don't know how to better explain this.

Thanks again to everyone for the help and the infromation. I am a member of only one forum and this thread just perferctly represents why I have chosen this one.

Stay smart, people!

One other thought..you said earlier that you had a sata RAID config. The specs for that computer show a single sata drive. Often, with a raid config, if you disable raid in the bios, the xp install will see a sata drive. I know this does you no good for a repair install, but I am trying to figure out a single drive raid. (oh..btw..sp2 does include much of the tablet edition stuff, but tablet edition is still a superset of xp pro even with the sp2 installed.)