What are your BIOS SATA/AHCI settings? And what connectors are your drives connected to?

I didn't look up the specs on this motherboard (I'm guessing it has an extra SATA controller in addition to the Intel one), but you need to be slipstreaming some AHCI drivers for that Intel chipset, not just for "Asmedia 106X" SATA controller.

My suggestion: make sure your ODD and SSD are both plugged on the Intel controller (and the SSD on a lower-numbered port than the ODD), set the BIOS to AHCI, slipstream a new disk (and start from a factory SP3 disk rather than slipstream SP3) with the Intel SATA AHCI drivers, then try again. You can worry about any other controllers once XP is running happily.

VivienM wrote on 2023-10-01, 03:11:

What are your BIOS SATA/AHCI settings? And what connectors are your drives connected to?

I didn't look up the specs on this motherboard (I'm guessing it has an extra SATA controller in addition to the Intel one), but you need to be slipstreaming some AHCI drivers for that Intel chipset, not just for "Asmedia 106X" SATA controller.

My suggestion: make sure your ODD and SSD are both plugged on the Intel controller (and the SSD on a lower-numbered port than the ODD), set the BIOS to AHCI, slipstream a new disk (and start from a factory SP3 disk rather than slipstream SP3) with the Intel SATA AHCI drivers, then try again. You can worry about any other controllers once XP is running happily.

I've tried it with the BIOS using IDE and AHCI, and I've also tried with a SP3 ISO using WinSetupFromUSB -- which has drivers it loads in, but it could be missing the one I need. I only have an external ODD, so I suppose that could be an issue -- but it detects and boots from it. What's confusing me the most is why it worked the first time... I'll see if I can find a driver for the chipset and slipstream that in too. Should I burn a new disk, or try the USB again?

My SSD is on one of the SATA 3 ports.

Dandelion212 wrote on 2023-10-01, 03:18:

I've tried it with the BIOS using IDE and AHCI, and I've also tried with a SP3 ISO using WinSetupFromUSB -- which has drivers it loads in, but it could be missing the one I need. I only have an external ODD, so I suppose that could be an issue -- but it detects and boots from it. What's confusing me the most is why it worked the first time... I'll see if I can find a driver for the chipset and slipstream that in too. Should I burn a new disk, or try the USB again?

My SSD is on one of the SATA 3 ports.

You want the driver labelled "SATA Floppy Image ver:11.2.0.1006
Windows® XP
623.28KB" on ASRock's web site - that's the Intel one, and the one that should be slipstreamed.

I will let others comment on flash drives, USB optical drives, etc. I've never installed XP from anything other than a CD on a PATA/SATA ODD. But the fact that once it rebooted into 'real' XP, it had mad issues finding your CD apparently and didn't actually copy most of the files properly... suggests to me it really didn't like the USB ODD.

Do you have a SATA optical drive you could dig up and plug in?

Dandelion212 wrote on 2023-10-01, 03:18:

My SSD is on one of the SATA 3 ports.

The ports hooked up to which controller? The spec sheet for that board says: "- 2 x SATA3 6.0 Gb/s connectors by Intel® Z77, support RAID (RAID 0, RAID 1, RAID 5, RAID 10, Intel® Rapid Storage and Intel® Smart Response Technology), NCQ, AHCI and Hot Plug functions
- 2 x SATA3 6.0 Gb/s connectors by ASMedia ASM1061, support NCQ, AHCI and Hot Plug functions (SATA3_A1 connector is shared with eSATA3 port)"

IMHO, you do not want to be using that ASMedia controller for your boot drive.

The 'right' way to do it (IMO) is the SSD on the first SATA3 Intel connector and your optical drive (if you can find one) on one of the SATA2 ports.

VivienM wrote on 2023-10-01, 03:26:

You want the driver labelled "SATA Floppy Image ver:11.2.0.1006 Windows® XP 623.28KB" on ASRock's web site - that's the Intel […]
Show full quote

Dandelion212 wrote on 2023-10-01, 03:18:

I've tried it with the BIOS using IDE and AHCI, and I've also tried with a SP3 ISO using WinSetupFromUSB -- which has drivers it loads in, but it could be missing the one I need. I only have an external ODD, so I suppose that could be an issue -- but it detects and boots from it. What's confusing me the most is why it worked the first time... I'll see if I can find a driver for the chipset and slipstream that in too. Should I burn a new disk, or try the USB again?

My SSD is on one of the SATA 3 ports.

You want the driver labelled "SATA Floppy Image ver:11.2.0.1006
Windows® XP
623.28KB" on ASRock's web site - that's the Intel one, and the one that should be slipstreamed.

I will let others comment on flash drives, USB optical drives, etc. I've never installed XP from anything other than a CD on a PATA/SATA ODD. But the fact that once it rebooted into 'real' XP, it had mad issues finding your CD apparently and didn't actually copy most of the files properly... suggests to me it really didn't like the USB ODD.

Do you have a SATA optical drive you could dig up and plug in?

I don't, unfortunately. The case I acquired doesn't have a slot for one, and I already had an external, so I didn't bother. Nothing in the massive computer parts bin we have in the basement either -- though that did hilariously turn up an EGA cable and a GPU from 2008. I'll go slipstream that driver in and see what happens. I did have a feeling it didn't like the USB drive, which is why I tried booting from USB -- I'll probably try that first with this new driver.

VivienM wrote on 2023-10-01, 03:29:

The ports hooked up to which controller? The spec sheet for that board says: "- 2 x SATA3 6.0 Gb/s connectors by Intel® Z77, sup […]
Show full quote

Dandelion212 wrote on 2023-10-01, 03:18:

My SSD is on one of the SATA 3 ports.

The ports hooked up to which controller? The spec sheet for that board says: "- 2 x SATA3 6.0 Gb/s connectors by Intel® Z77, support RAID (RAID 0, RAID 1, RAID 5, RAID 10, Intel® Rapid Storage and Intel® Smart Response Technology), NCQ, AHCI and Hot Plug functions
- 2 x SATA3 6.0 Gb/s connectors by ASMedia ASM1061, support NCQ, AHCI and Hot Plug functions (SATA3_A1 connector is shared with eSATA3 port)"

IMHO, you do not want to be using that ASMedia controller for your boot drive.

The 'right' way to do it (IMO) is the SSD on the first SATA3 Intel connector and your optical drive (if you can find one) on one of the SATA2 ports.

I'm on the ports in the middle marked Sata3 without the A0 or A1... so I believe those are the Intel ones.

VivienM wrote on 2023-10-01, 03:29:

The ports hooked up to which controller? The spec sheet for that board says: "- 2 x SATA3 6.0 Gb/s connectors by Intel® Z77, sup […]
Show full quote

Dandelion212 wrote on 2023-10-01, 03:18:

My SSD is on one of the SATA 3 ports.

The ports hooked up to which controller? The spec sheet for that board says: "- 2 x SATA3 6.0 Gb/s connectors by Intel® Z77, support RAID (RAID 0, RAID 1, RAID 5, RAID 10, Intel® Rapid Storage and Intel® Smart Response Technology), NCQ, AHCI and Hot Plug functions
- 2 x SATA3 6.0 Gb/s connectors by ASMedia ASM1061, support NCQ, AHCI and Hot Plug functions (SATA3_A1 connector is shared with eSATA3 port)"

IMHO, you do not want to be using that ASMedia controller for your boot drive.

The 'right' way to do it (IMO) is the SSD on the first SATA3 Intel connector and your optical drive (if you can find one) on one of the SATA2 ports.

The USB worked! Thank you! I never would've thought to download a driver that mentioned a floppy lmao.....

Dandelion212 wrote on 2023-10-02, 00:51:

The USB worked! Thank you! I never would've thought to download a driver that mentioned a floppy lmao.....

Well, the XP (and probably prior versions of NT) installer asks for an F6 floppy, and there are relatively few non-floppy ways of providing those drivers (flash drives and optical drives need not apply)... so they just came to be known as F6 floppies (or F6 disks). Even has a wikipedia page too (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F6_disk).

I'm sure SCSI folks may have been dealing with these kinds of issues for a long time, but for mere mortals who couldn't afford SCSI, the first time this really became an issue was with the rise of SATA/AHCI starting, oh, 2004 or so. Doesn't help that if you install XP with the wrong SATA/IDE mode and wanted to change it later, you had to reinstall... (I suspect by now people have figured out how to avoid that, but it wasn't the case at the time)

Slipstreaming wasn't exactly that easy back in the day, either... blank discs were pricier, burners relatively rare, and the software to automate the slipstreaming process and generate bootable burned discs wasn't really around or in wide use yet.

I actually have a vague recollection that I may even have bought a motherboard or two in the mid-2000s where an actual floppy with the drivers was in the box. At some point, once motherboard manufacturers started assuming you'd run Vista/7, they switched to just giving you the 'F6 floppy' contents on the CD or the web site for you to make yourself if you were going to run XP.

You messed up slipstreaming the drivers into the CD.

Redo it and try again.
The F6 floppy disk has an OEM file...

Myself I wouldnt bother with any of that at all. I would download Easy2Boot and use that to install XP.

VivienM wrote on 2023-10-02, 01:08:

Well, the XP (and probably prior versions of NT) installer asks for an F6 floppy, and there are relatively few non-floppy ways o […]
Show full quote

Dandelion212 wrote on 2023-10-02, 00:51:

The USB worked! Thank you! I never would've thought to download a driver that mentioned a floppy lmao.....

Well, the XP (and probably prior versions of NT) installer asks for an F6 floppy, and there are relatively few non-floppy ways of providing those drivers (flash drives and optical drives need not apply)... so they just came to be known as F6 floppies (or F6 disks). Even has a wikipedia page too (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F6_disk).

I'm sure SCSI folks may have been dealing with these kinds of issues for a long time, but for mere mortals who couldn't afford SCSI, the first time this really became an issue was with the rise of SATA/AHCI starting, oh, 2004 or so. Doesn't help that if you install XP with the wrong SATA/IDE mode and wanted to change it later, you had to reinstall... (I suspect by now people have figured out how to avoid that, but it wasn't the case at the time)

Slipstreaming wasn't exactly that easy back in the day, either... blank discs were pricier, burners relatively rare, and the software to automate the slipstreaming process and generate bootable burned discs wasn't really around or in wide use yet.

I actually have a vague recollection that I may even have bought a motherboard or two in the mid-2000s where an actual floppy with the drivers was in the box. At some point, once motherboard manufacturers started assuming you'd run Vista/7, they switched to just giving you the 'F6 floppy' contents on the CD or the web site for you to make yourself if you were going to run XP.

No.
There are no other ways to provide those drivers at all. a standard none edited CD will always look for those drivers from a floppy disk drive and will not accept them from a source other than a floppy drive.
I saw a youtube video of a guy restoring a Dell Precision machine. He said he worked on them back in the day and hes just reliving the memories a few years later...
He then goes in to say he didnt understand why these all powerful machines were supplied with floppy drives!

No of course its a whole lot easier what with USB boot and slipstreaming. But those tools werent always available.

ElectroSoldier wrote on 2023-10-02, 11:39:

No. There are no other ways to provide those drivers at all. a standard none edited CD will always look for those drivers from a […]
Show full quote

VivienM wrote on 2023-10-02, 01:08:

Well, the XP (and probably prior versions of NT) installer asks for an F6 floppy, and there are relatively few non-floppy ways o […]
Show full quote

Dandelion212 wrote on 2023-10-02, 00:51:

The USB worked! Thank you! I never would've thought to download a driver that mentioned a floppy lmao.....

Well, the XP (and probably prior versions of NT) installer asks for an F6 floppy, and there are relatively few non-floppy ways of providing those drivers (flash drives and optical drives need not apply)... so they just came to be known as F6 floppies (or F6 disks). Even has a wikipedia page too (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F6_disk).

I'm sure SCSI folks may have been dealing with these kinds of issues for a long time, but for mere mortals who couldn't afford SCSI, the first time this really became an issue was with the rise of SATA/AHCI starting, oh, 2004 or so. Doesn't help that if you install XP with the wrong SATA/IDE mode and wanted to change it later, you had to reinstall... (I suspect by now people have figured out how to avoid that, but it wasn't the case at the time)

Slipstreaming wasn't exactly that easy back in the day, either... blank discs were pricier, burners relatively rare, and the software to automate the slipstreaming process and generate bootable burned discs wasn't really around or in wide use yet.

I actually have a vague recollection that I may even have bought a motherboard or two in the mid-2000s where an actual floppy with the drivers was in the box. At some point, once motherboard manufacturers started assuming you'd run Vista/7, they switched to just giving you the 'F6 floppy' contents on the CD or the web site for you to make yourself if you were going to run XP.

No.
There are no other ways to provide those drivers at all. a standard none edited CD will always look for those drivers from a floppy disk drive and will not accept them from a source other than a floppy drive.
I saw a youtube video of a guy restoring a Dell Precision machine. He said he worked on them back in the day and hes just reliving the memories a few years later...
He then goes in to say he didnt understand why these all powerful machines were supplied with floppy drives!

No of course its a whole lot easier what with USB boot and slipstreaming. But those tools werent always available.

Sorry, I'm confused - isn't that exactly what I said? (Okay, I was maybe a little less categorical, but the main ways are floppy and slipstreaming... and we both talk about how slipstreaming was not necessarily that practical back in the day)

I actually do wonder what people did in 2006ish as floppies did start to get far more rare (I certainly still put that lovely combo floppy/card reader Mitsumi unit in machines I was building in 2006, but... I think that was just me being conservative. Or was it?). I think the answer is probably - run their SATA controllers in IDE mode, or, for non-home-built-machines, avoid the issue by having OEM restore CDs.

VivienM wrote on 2023-10-02, 12:07:

ElectroSoldier wrote on 2023-10-02, 11:39:

No. There are no other ways to provide those drivers at all. a standard none edited CD will always look for those drivers from a […]
Show full quote

VivienM wrote on 2023-10-02, 01:08:

Well, the XP (and probably prior versions of NT) installer asks for an F6 floppy, and there are relatively few non-floppy ways o […]
Show full quote

Well, the XP (and probably prior versions of NT) installer asks for an F6 floppy, and there are relatively few non-floppy ways of providing those drivers (flash drives and optical drives need not apply)... so they just came to be known as F6 floppies (or F6 disks). Even has a wikipedia page too (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F6_disk).

I'm sure SCSI folks may have been dealing with these kinds of issues for a long time, but for mere mortals who couldn't afford SCSI, the first time this really became an issue was with the rise of SATA/AHCI starting, oh, 2004 or so. Doesn't help that if you install XP with the wrong SATA/IDE mode and wanted to change it later, you had to reinstall... (I suspect by now people have figured out how to avoid that, but it wasn't the case at the time)

Slipstreaming wasn't exactly that easy back in the day, either... blank discs were pricier, burners relatively rare, and the software to automate the slipstreaming process and generate bootable burned discs wasn't really around or in wide use yet.

I actually have a vague recollection that I may even have bought a motherboard or two in the mid-2000s where an actual floppy with the drivers was in the box. At some point, once motherboard manufacturers started assuming you'd run Vista/7, they switched to just giving you the 'F6 floppy' contents on the CD or the web site for you to make yourself if you were going to run XP.

No.
There are no other ways to provide those drivers at all. a standard none edited CD will always look for those drivers from a floppy disk drive and will not accept them from a source other than a floppy drive.
I saw a youtube video of a guy restoring a Dell Precision machine. He said he worked on them back in the day and hes just reliving the memories a few years later...
He then goes in to say he didnt understand why these all powerful machines were supplied with floppy drives!

No of course its a whole lot easier what with USB boot and slipstreaming. But those tools werent always available.

Sorry, I'm confused - isn't that exactly what I said? (Okay, I was maybe a little less categorical, but the main ways are floppy and slipstreaming... and we both talk about how slipstreaming was not necessarily that practical back in the day)

I actually do wonder what people did in 2006ish as floppies did start to get far more rare (I certainly still put that lovely combo floppy/card reader Mitsumi unit in machines I was building in 2006, but... I think that was just me being conservative. Or was it?). I think the answer is probably - run their SATA controllers in IDE mode, or, for non-home-built-machines, avoid the issue by having OEM restore CDs.

Exactly that. Back then there was no other way to do it. As we are talking retro hardware implying the idea that something else might be possible isnt helpful.

Most of my post was about how people dont know but like to give the impression that they do, and give themselves away by asking such basic questions as to why a Dell Precision 690 might have been supplied with a floppy drive considering it had almost no use for it... ALMOST being the key part there.

I remember when slipstreaming became a thing, it wasnt until XP SP1 that it was even know about. Even though it was possible to do it to much older version of Win2k.
Until then you had to have a floppy drive. That was mid 2002. by the time SP1a came out it was very much the thing to create a custom XP install in the scene, and it reached epidemic proportions so as to nuke releases for being custom installs.

By 2006 then you had what I described above, machines that had "exotic" RAID controllers came with the floppy otherwise they were fitted less and less (I still have one of those floppy drives with a card reader). That was the point you fitted one because its what you did rather than you know it will see any use. Most people didnt know the difference between Native and IDe mode anyway, the drive was SATA so thats enough for it to be so.

If you want to build a retro XP system and have it install onto a system that has a RAID controller or SATA drive whos drivers are not included on the disk then XP does need a floppy drive to install.
Thats using the traditional method, the method we used back in the day when it was current.
However there was many ways around that these days.

Easy2Boot is a good example. a Custom ISO and a USB drive is all you need on modern hardware like a Z77 motherboard. You dont even need to burn the ISO to disc anymore and generic drivers will do just to install the OS.

ElectroSoldier wrote on 2023-10-02, 13:00:

Exactly that. Back then there was no other way to do it. As we are talking retro hardware implying the idea that something else might be possible isnt helpful.

And at the same time, I think it's dangerous to be too too categorical on some of these things. A lot of things are better understood 20+ years out, and just because you would have always done it a certain way 20 years ago and you were unaware of any other way back then... doesn't mean that there wasn't some other way of doing it that has become well-established in the retro community in the intervening 20 years.

So, sure, I could be more definite, but that's just inviting someone with better knowledge/expertise to prove me wrong. 😀

ElectroSoldier wrote on 2023-10-02, 13:00:

Most of my post was about how people dont know but like to give the impression that they do, and give themselves away by asking such basic questions as to why a Dell Precision 690 might have been supplied with a floppy drive considering it had almost no use for it... ALMOST being the key part there.

I remember when slipstreaming became a thing, it wasnt until XP SP1 that it was even know about. Even though it was possible to do it to much older version of Win2k.
Until then you had to have a floppy drive. That was mid 2002. by the time SP1a came out it was very much the thing to create a custom XP install in the scene, and it reached epidemic proportions so as to nuke releases for being custom installs.

You may laugh at this, but the first time I ever slipstreamed anything was a few months ago to set up a retro XP system on a system that "lost" its floppy drive in 2010. (Seriously, I still have the floppy drive, but I moved the board and some other things to a new case in 2010, decided to install the floppy drive later because that case is an unwieldy mess for an external 3.5" bay, and... 13 years later, the floppy drive was still in a random box of stuff). The few machines I would have had back in the day that needed AHCI drivers, I would just have done the floppy thing.

But in 2023 where I have more blank CD-Rs, DVD+/-Rs, etc than I will ever use, where 2x700 megs of working space is a rounding error, etc, whereas floppies are rare and who knows if that drive I took out in 2010 still works, it just made sense to slipstream 😀 and I guess you are telling me there would have been a newer/better way of doing it...

And yes, I admit that I find it weird that someone would be puzzled by a floppy drive in, oh, 2005-6. Steve Jobs may have killed floppy drives in his world in 1998, but in DOS/Windows world, even for say, school stuff, floppy disks remained quite commonly used to transfer data, etc until the mid-2000s. Wouldn't have occurred to me to build/order a computer without a floppy drive until, oh, 2008-9.

Most computers thru about 2006 did come with floppy drive or an option for one. Have an IBM NetVista and another OEM computer (Dell Vostro) that came with floppy drives from mid-2000's....
Yep Lil history: The Windows XP OEM Preinstallation Kit (OPK for doing slipstreaming) was avail for all OEM's with XP RTM before XP was officially released in 2001. For MS registered system builders and MS Action Pack subscribers it was a bit later and about 2002 when SP2 came out and mentioned on sites like Tom's Hardware, Anantech, etc and then leaked to dark world 🤣. The general public release was in 2004 when XP SP2 was released iirc. I was an MS Partner and Action Pack subscriber 2000-2009 and got the XP OPK in 2002. Used it many times over the decades.Back then for about $150 a year (now equal to about $700) you got all the MS new stuff if you qualified.
Have four disc binders they sent over the years and quarterly you got more goodies to add to those binders.
Ok if the I got the years wrong am going from memory but slipstreaming was a real thing from about 2001 onward...
attached shows three of them folders (have four) and a picture of the Server 2003 OEM kit disk tools, it has the Server 2003 OPK slipstream kit, release date Oct. 2003 😁. Cant find the XP OPK cd ATM but do have it in one them folders so yes Slipstreaming was real for XP from 2001 up....

You can "slipstream" NT4 by copying it's files over the original files on the CD but you'll need to reinstall the SP after reinstall benefit is the bugs fixed in the SP for installs are fixed.

Windows 2000 SP1 was released Aug 15, 2000 but obviously earlier builds were in testing before that but remember most businesses weren't chomping at the bit to upgrade on either 2000 or XP at SP1.
https://www.itprotoday.com/compute-engines/js … nd-service-pack

nlite was also a thing in 2000 as well. Can't remember if driver integration was in that version though.

https://web.archive.org/web/20040919001157/ht … ead21978-1.html

Most easiest method would be patch original image with achi drivers and use usb with easy2boot as I did not long ago, as I had same issues .

VivienM wrote on 2023-10-02, 21:48:

And at the same time, I think it's dangerous to be too too categorical on some of these things. A lot of things are better under […]
Show full quote

ElectroSoldier wrote on 2023-10-02, 13:00:

Exactly that. Back then there was no other way to do it. As we are talking retro hardware implying the idea that something else might be possible isnt helpful.

And at the same time, I think it's dangerous to be too too categorical on some of these things. A lot of things are better understood 20+ years out, and just because you would have always done it a certain way 20 years ago and you were unaware of any other way back then... doesn't mean that there wasn't some other way of doing it that has become well-established in the retro community in the intervening 20 years.

So, sure, I could be more definite, but that's just inviting someone with better knowledge/expertise to prove me wrong. 😀

ElectroSoldier wrote on 2023-10-02, 13:00:

Most of my post was about how people dont know but like to give the impression that they do, and give themselves away by asking such basic questions as to why a Dell Precision 690 might have been supplied with a floppy drive considering it had almost no use for it... ALMOST being the key part there.

I remember when slipstreaming became a thing, it wasnt until XP SP1 that it was even know about. Even though it was possible to do it to much older version of Win2k.
Until then you had to have a floppy drive. That was mid 2002. by the time SP1a came out it was very much the thing to create a custom XP install in the scene, and it reached epidemic proportions so as to nuke releases for being custom installs.

You may laugh at this, but the first time I ever slipstreamed anything was a few months ago to set up a retro XP system on a system that "lost" its floppy drive in 2010. (Seriously, I still have the floppy drive, but I moved the board and some other things to a new case in 2010, decided to install the floppy drive later because that case is an unwieldy mess for an external 3.5" bay, and... 13 years later, the floppy drive was still in a random box of stuff). The few machines I would have had back in the day that needed AHCI drivers, I would just have done the floppy thing.

But in 2023 where I have more blank CD-Rs, DVD+/-Rs, etc than I will ever use, where 2x700 megs of working space is a rounding error, etc, whereas floppies are rare and who knows if that drive I took out in 2010 still works, it just made sense to slipstream 😀 and I guess you are telling me there would have been a newer/better way of doing it...

And yes, I admit that I find it weird that someone would be puzzled by a floppy drive in, oh, 2005-6. Steve Jobs may have killed floppy drives in his world in 1998, but in DOS/Windows world, even for say, school stuff, floppy disks remained quite commonly used to transfer data, etc until the mid-2000s. Wouldn't have occurred to me to build/order a computer without a floppy drive until, oh, 2008-9.

Yeah I can understand that way of thinking but we got to do what we did through a process of trial and error. Which in itself nullifies your whole point on a Been there, tried that basis.

I think you have misunderstood what Im talking about...

Using Easy2Boot you still need to make a custom XP ISO, you just dont need to burn it to a CD.

Easy2Boot has some common disk controller drivers it can use for the more common ones, otherwise if your using a RAID controller then you still need to make a Windows XP ISO with the drivers slipstreamed, or a floppy disk with the drivers on it and press F6 at the prompt and add them with a floppy disk.
There are only 2 options. Its not me, its the way XP install was written, and as its closed it cant be changed. Even though you can edit the CD contents to your hearts content.

The idea is
Make an Easy2Boot USB stick
Make your custom XP ISO with the drivers, service pack, apps etc etc
Create a bootable ISO
Put the ISO file on the Easy2Boot USB stick in the WinXP folder
Boot the PC with the USB stick and follow the prompts for legacy BIOS (not UEFI install)
If installing XP then follow the prompts onscreen to do that.

Steve Jobs could kill the floppy in his world in '98 because the software and hardware was so locked down. Not because it was better or more futuristic. Elimination of choice was how he did it. When was the last time you saw a Mac Pro with a SAS RAID controller bought off ebay for £30?

Horun wrote on 2023-10-03, 02:56:

Most computers thru about 2006 did come with floppy drive or an option for one. Have an IBM NetVista and another OEM computer (D […]
Show full quote

Most computers thru about 2006 did come with floppy drive or an option for one. Have an IBM NetVista and another OEM computer (Dell Vostro) that came with floppy drives from mid-2000's....
Yep Lil history: The Windows XP OEM Preinstallation Kit (OPK for doing slipstreaming) was avail for all OEM's with XP RTM before XP was officially released in 2001. For MS registered system builders and MS Action Pack subscribers it was a bit later and about 2002 when SP2 came out and mentioned on sites like Tom's Hardware, Anantech, etc and then leaked to dark world 🤣. The general public release was in 2004 when XP SP2 was released iirc. I was an MS Partner and Action Pack subscriber 2000-2009 and got the XP OPK in 2002. Used it many times over the decades.Back then for about $150 a year (now equal to about $700) you got all the MS new stuff if you qualified.
Have four disc binders they sent over the years and quarterly you got more goodies to add to those binders.
Ok if the I got the years wrong am going from memory but slipstreaming was a real thing from about 2001 onward...
attached shows three of them folders (have four) and a picture of the Server 2003 OEM kit disk tools, it has the Server 2003 OPK slipstream kit, release date Oct. 2003 😁. Cant find the XP OPK cd ATM but do have it in one them folders so yes Slipstreaming was real for XP from 2001 up....

Yeah and a bit of history for you too
Back then on 0day the only way to get the OPK CD was in a OEM pack of CDs. If you bought 3x OEM licences they came in a box and that box also had the OPK CD. Otherwise you could request the OPK CD if you could prove you were an OEM, which at the time there were a lot of hoops to jump through to prove you were a valid OEM in the eyes of Microsoft.

Fun fact for you. Microsoft had a training course for the OPK and its use as a Microsoft system builder.

The OPK CD was released on RTM day. That is also the day "the dark world" gained the ability to slipstream. But as microsoft didnt tell anybody how to use it until the training came out for it, as mentioned above, then it sat on scene FTP servers unused and unnoticed.
Dont forget the dark world was using XP for a few weeks before its official release date...
Where do you think those VLM images came from?

MSDN and the Select software program were good. I still have all of mine too. Mine starts a few months after Windows 95 was released and goes all the way to Windows server 2012 R2
I still have access to the later software through friends who still had access to their account but mine finished then.

Slipstreaming was a think for OEMs but not for us normal home users it wasnt. How many people on here even know what an OPK is let alone has one. yes I still have an XP OPK CD but Im in the minority even today. If you wanted to make a slipstream CD then you got nLite, not the OPK CD!!! It was at that point it became a thing people did because the software was useable.

Trying to make out like its a thing both then and now when you have youtube full of people struggling to install operating systems on to PCs that dont have a CD ROM or floppy drive. When you tell them they dont need to just a system that is similar that they can install on and use sysprep none of them know what youre talking about.

So yes it was release on RTM day, i mean well yeah it would have to have been woudlnt it.
But that doesnt mean there was any practical way to use it outside of being an OEM with access to the OPK CD.

The OPK was used to create a deployable OS that you could use to create an image to deploy to many systems.
So when an OEM makes a new system they build their first computer and install the OS, they use the OPK tools to do various things like they could remove the monior drivers or video card drivers because not all systems will have that video card and then they use that hard drive to image other hard drives, so now you have many hard drives with Windows already installed on it just waiting to be fitted into a computer, on first boot it will ask for the drivers if they were removed with the sysprep tool, if not then there it is a computer with an OS that was never actually installed onto THAT computer.

Sony made a lot of small unusual computers that have no way to install an OS into, there is no floppy, no CDROM but somehow they managed to install an OS onto it.
Fact is they didnt. They made the first system and then deployed the OS from there to others. And you can do that because the tools on the OPK allow you to remove devices (sysprep... saprep does the same for servers and is what allows the OEM to remove the devices and drivers in headless appliances). The two systems need to be similar but not the same, the devices can be removed from the system and then once the system has the devices removed its used to image another hard disk and on next boot it will load up drivers.

Slipstreaming wasnt needed at the start of XPs life because most of the SATA drivers were in there already, it wasnt until you got a new crop of hardware that you needed press f6 drivers, which started to come about the time of SP1a to SP2.
So in the early years it was a solution looking for a problem.

DosFreak wrote on 2023-10-03, 05:00:

You can "slipstream" NT4 by copying it's files over the original files on the CD but you'll need to reinstall the SP after reins […]
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You can "slipstream" NT4 by copying it's files over the original files on the CD but you'll need to reinstall the SP after reinstall benefit is the bugs fixed in the SP for installs are fixed.

Windows 2000 SP1 was released Aug 15, 2000 but obviously earlier builds were in testing before that but remember most businesses weren't chomping at the bit to upgrade on either 2000 or XP at SP1.
https://www.itprotoday.com/compute-engines/js … nd-service-pack

nlite was also a thing in 2000 as well. Can't remember if driver integration was in that version though.

https://web.archive.org/web/20040919001157/ht … ead21978-1.html

Yeah I think in modern times slipstreaming into NT4 is almost mandatory, because the base OS without service packs makes even the install a problem.
I still use NT4 server and wouldnt be without my custom CD to install it.

ElectroSoldier wrote on 2023-10-03, 16:25:

I think you have misunderstood what Im talking about... […]
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I think you have misunderstood what Im talking about...

Using Easy2Boot you still need to make a custom XP ISO, you just dont need to burn it to a CD.

Easy2Boot has some common disk controller drivers it can use for the more common ones, otherwise if your using a RAID controller then you still need to make a Windows XP ISO with the drivers slipstreamed, or a floppy disk with the drivers on it and press F6 at the prompt and add them with a floppy disk.
There are only 2 options. Its not me, its the way XP install was written, and as its closed it cant be changed. Even though you can edit the CD contents to your hearts content.

The idea is
Make an Easy2Boot USB stick
Make your custom XP ISO with the drivers, service pack, apps etc etc
Create a bootable ISO
Put the ISO file on the Easy2Boot USB stick in the WinXP folder
Boot the PC with the USB stick and follow the prompts for legacy BIOS (not UEFI install)
If installing XP then follow the prompts onscreen to do that.

Okay, so basically, Easy2Boot is one of those things that lets you boot ISOs. I've used other ones, at least to boot Linux ISOs and maybe, maybe, I forget, Win7/8/10/11-style ISOs. They seem quite finicky as to which ISOs work and which don't. Didn't realize someone had managed to get XP booting off that type of thing...