This is only for personal use. Ive seen slipstreamed XP copy's that apparently are designed to load onto any system unattended and have all the settings and program preloaded as desired. No entering timezones or going through lengthy tweaks.

So ive been wanting to do this to my specs, and seeing as i wont be switching to vista, ever, i want to create a slipstreamed cd that will see me through the many changes in hardware for the next decade. After some research it appears that ghost images are tied to the HAL (hardware abstraction layer) as well as chipsets and every other thing i dont quite understand, but essentially states that if you change your motherboard or processor, windows will break, period. People have also tried using sysprep, a windows utility to designed for OEM's and IT Admins to mass produce their version of windows across company machines. But it seems in the process you must designate drivers which are tied to hardware, so unless you are planning on swapping your old computer out for the exact same one it is quite pointless. So using ghost images is out of the question.

Slipstreaming itself remains. From the couple tutorials i read through on it, it seem they fall into the same trap by pre-assigning drivers which in turn lock the version of windows to the hardware it was installed on.

What i want to know is, does anyone know of a tutorial or a program that can create a slipstreamed XP cd that like a normal XP cd is unaffected by which hardware its installed on?

See if this is what your looking for:

http://www.winsupersite.com/showcase/windowsxp_sp2_slipstream.asp

and this may be of interest:

http://www.informationweek.com/story/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=47212312

I read both links and the links contained therein and they all say exactly the same thing: "how to take your old XP cd and integrate it with a service pack".

I already have the XP cd with all the updates etc..., what i want is to make a fresh install cd with all the programs and settings already loaded. However i dont want to drivers to be included because the whole point of doing this is to load windows exactly how i want it onto any machine that i want. None of the tutorials listed mentioned anything about doing this.

I know its possible, i just need to know how.

You are talking about cloning or imaging your drive?

Does this tutorial contain the type of thing you would like to do?

Basically it involves loading up a system to a "scratch" position with the O/S installed and all of the very basic drivers included then "ghosting/cloning/imaging" this exact setup onto a CD which you can use to give any machine a fresh start. See this information as well.

Back in "the day" when I cloned NT systems in a corporate environment, we simply slapped an image onto a hard drive from a CD then ran a program called NewSid to make sure each system had a unique security id.

Home licensing isn't the same, of course, So technically you would need as many licenses as you have machines to be cloned, or a corporate license.

Anyone else fell free to bring me up to date on this since it has been some years back for me.

CAGL,
IQ

I think this makes the process easy for Windows XP.

http://unattended.msfn.org/unattended.xp/view/web/1/SESSID=ad3de4eeab2ac2256de594d23be3029a/