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document updated 16 years ago, on Apr 9, 2008

Running installer from the hard-drive, after being prepared with Knoppix

You need two things:

a LiveCD that can access a wide variety of network + USB thumb drive resources, that you use to compile the desired directory structure on a small FAT32 partition on the hard drive (Knoppix is great for this, because its purpose in life is to have the vast majority of hardware drivers built-in and autodetectable; Samba + web browser + FTP + thumb drive + more are available)
something that allows DOS to be booted, so i386/winnt.exe can be started. There are a variety of ways:
- Super Grub Disk (part of the Ultimate Boot CD) is VERY useful for either automatically fixing boot problems, or to boot into targets that simply aren't possible otherwise
- ms-sys+io.sys+msdos.sys+command.com, or Win98 bootdisk's format /s might do it too, but I haven't had any luck with these (ms-sys is by default part of Knoppix)

Tips:

The size of the FAT32 partition should be the size of your /i386/ directory PLUS 600MB FREE SPACE. 1.5gb should be good.
If you have the kind of SATA/RAID drivers that use a textmode.oem file, put all of its files in the \i386\$OEM$\textmode\ directory

Dream DVD

Thus, you can build a single DVD that can generate ALL the "slipstream" combinations you need:

it boots into Knoppix
in auxilliary storage somewhere, it contains the Win98SE io.sys + msdos.sys + command.com
it also stores the install files for all windows OS's you'll ever need to install: (easiest just to store each in a .zip file, so that they can be unpacked in the root dir, and they can contain whatever directory structure is needed)
- 2000
- XP
- 2003
- Vista?
- 2008?
and SATA/RAID drivers for all machines you ever install on. For me, these are: (also each in a .zip file)
- HP ProLiant DL360 G4
- HP ProLiant DL360 G5
- HP wx4600 (XP=SP38265?)

Though it's also helpful to carry the Ultimate Boot CD (just for the Super Grub Disk) with you to fix things if you don't manage to get the installer booting straight away.

Also, when you want to bring along new SATA/RAID drivers, just keep those on your thumb drive until the next time you burn a new copy of the DVD.

HOWTO include drivers into installation

LOTS of articles

Paused/deferred

When I last stopped working on this, I was able to get it to boot into the $win_nt$.~bt stage, but then it asks for F6 drivers. I was hoping to find an easy way to integrate whatever txtsetup.oem files I needed, without needing extensive modification. (as-is, the nLite tool made it somewhat clear what the more lengthy adjustments would be needed — see \I386\NLDRV\001\ after integrating a driver — but I was hoping to find an alternative way)

(eg. is it possible to run subst before that second stage exe (whatever it may be) runs?)