nLite Saves the Day

I recently bought a new notebook and installed the 64-bit edition of Vista Business on it. I'm running Vista on 6 machines at home and one at work, and overall I like the OS... but I'm not in like with it. Anyway, I've had nothing but headaches with 64-bit Vista, partly because the 64-bit version won't load 32-bit and/or unsigned drivers, and partly because Vista takes about a fortnight to boot or resume from hibernation on this notebook, despite very respectable CPU/memory specs and even the Intel Turbo Memory upgrade (so far, my official opinion is 'don't waste your money').

So, I'm "upgrading" (take that!) to Windows XP Professional. I'm not washing my hands and saying I'm done with Vista yet, because it still runs acceptably on my other machines, and I haven't proven to myself (yet) that XP will be that much better on this notebook... but I suspect it will be.

XP doesn't come with SATA hard disk drivers for this notebook, so I had to download them and copy them to a floppy disk for this installation. That's not a big deal. The notebook doesn't have a floppy drive, but I have a USB floppy drive for such occasions.

Press enter to boot from CD, press F6 to load a third-party driver, S to select the driver from the floppy, F8 to sign away my firstborn to the devil accept the Microsoft EULA, prepare the HD partition, and finally start copying files.

"Please insert the disk with the SATA driver into drive A: and press Enter."

But... the disk is already in drive A:. Fine, I'll press Enter. *Enter.* Nothing.

Great. So XP setup can see the disk during the first part of the install process, but not when copying files to the hard disk. Turns out that XP only supports some USB floppy drives, and mine isn't one of them. I tried a USB flash drive with no luck, so it looks like my remaining options are slipstreaming the drivers onto the XP install CD, or using Remote Installation Services. RIS is cool and I've had some success with it, but I don't have that kind of time tonight. I've slipstreamed drivers and service packs into Windows setup CDs before, but it's always been kind of a hassle to do that manually.

While looking for other options, I came across the nLite application. Slipstreaming the drivers with nLite was a breeze, and it looks like it handles service packs as well (I assume it's just as easy).

I went ahead and slipstreamed the appropriate SATA and Ethernet/wireless drivers onto the setup CD, and the rest of the Windows installation process went very smoothly. And best of all, nLite is free (donations appreciated)!