Well the first test FAILED.... si3132.sys in [SDF] was corrupt or missing.... Back to the drawing board....
Well i have been messing. And just in case anybody might be interested,here goes.. I have just intergrated my graphics driver into XP using nLite and all I can find that has changed is a new folder structure i386\NLDRV\001 I know that each and every new driver needs it's own folder,002,003 etc etc.. There is no WINNT.sif present ( I know I will add one to set up FULLY UNATTENDED ) And as far as i can gather the only difference in the TXTSETUP.sif is the follwing lines have been added. This intreagues me cause it makes me think all nLite is doing is compressing the driver files. Not too sure if this is absolutely vital or not then it makes a new folder structure and has TXTSETUP.sif point to those folders. the number "1984" I believe this to be a totally random number and any number would do as long as they correspond to each other. Plus the name of the "NLDRV",that could become "NewDrivers" or anything really as long as the "001" structure stays intact for each and every new driver. What I think I may do now is add ALL my drivers in one go using nLite and take a good long hard look at the folder srtucture and the TXTSETUP.sif file. Then I will try to replicate these but with slight tweaks using the folder names I choose. This is probbebly so old now your all yawning away asking why am I bothering...... I like to learn new stuff. Actually a bit giddy.... Cheers for reading...
I make my own disks too with nlite. But making an install disk with drivers (especially graphics) seem to me to be silly. For one, Graphics drivers as well as PhysX drivers change so quickly it seems a waste to have an install disk that loads old drivers. Once installed you then have to uninstall and reinstall new ones and problems can arise. And what happens if your Graphics card takes a poop, and you replace an nVidia card with a Radeon? Your disk is pretty much useless. Motherboard drivers can make the disk too independent as well. I try and keep my disks as general as possible with the latest criticals only and maybe a few small programs like 7zip and foxitPDF only. One time I integrated sata drivers on an XP disk and found later I could not use it for a non-destructive repair anymore (I went back to F6 still had a floppy). How much trouble is installing graphics anyway. Seems any time I install a fresh copy of the OS I visit the site for new drivers anyway.
I know what your your saying and I agree,to a certain degree but...... Well you see I must do a fresh install every month or more even. especially with Windows XP. I have a machine and it's only purpose is to run KeyGens,cracks and that sort of thing. testing software installs out and making sure I can get the serial so when I install it onto my main PC there is no need to worry what the keygen,crack is doing in the background. You know what i mean. I did figure out how to add drivers and it was really simple really although I do not like where the drivers are kept,still not figured out how to install them to where I want them though. Bringing your points up,only this afternoon I made myself and upto date Windows XP intergrated with all the lastest hotfixes and the like. It is made from a retail XP Pro SP3 x86 image. I have not added any drivers of OEM info,no key or owt. It will aloww me to make a disc which will be board specific i.e Abit AW9D Max or owt similar. For the price of a DVD-r and a little time I dont see any problem with making a Windows XP install disc board specific nor a Windows 7 one for that matter. I have lost count of the number of folk I have built machines for and done fresh installs on mates machines. Each time I ahve made them a Windows install disc for them to use in the future. To be honest they are amazed at what i can do but they too could learn how to do it. Besides all that I just love messing...... One thing after reading your post again. You use nLite....You see I just dont like it,nor vLite ot RT7 Lite. I dont know what else its doing. I used nLite to intergrate some drivers and then compared the disc files with Beyond Compare 3 and my god the changes nLite is doing startled me. i dont trust it. This is whay I wanted to intergrate the updates\hotfixes manually and why i wanted to learn how to intergrate my own drivers too.... Both these I now know how to do so I am happy..
@ tnx, I could have told you that noticed it years ago when working with MaxXP on UnattendXP, nuhi even put markers on files.
The nLIte issue is probably why the DriverPacks folks tell everyone their program is not compatible with nLite but has no problems witth the RyanVM Integrator
Just an off-topic suggestion, but I test all my software in VMWare Workstation. You could do the same or in VirtualBox. It's so quick and easy to make snapshots and just restore those snapshots after testing, or before testing something else if necessary.
Never used owt like that. I dont mind burning to disc and testing out installing onto a spare drive.....
You are in for a surprise vmware, VirtualBox, e.c.t can boot from your iso file no need to even burn it to cd/dvd. You can test all the software you like in Virtual machine and there are tools on the forum to add slic or slp to vmware, virtualBox, so you can test pre-activated installations. install your Os say xp or windows 7 on Vmware make a snapshot then install and test what you like then you can revert back to the snapshot i,e, clean installation or what ever way you have set it up.
You know i ahve stayed away from such things but you make it sound good...Might just check it out... Still having bother making the drivers live wher I want them to....Will figure it out though.. cheers..
Well I do hope this can go one step further.. Been messing with this for a while now and I still can't get it to do what I want. I will start with a very simple setup. This is for PNP not txtmode. Although I am using si3132 SATA drivers as an example...OK.. I have my 7 si3132 drivers Without compressing them I copied all of them into I386 folder. I edited DOSNET I edited TXTSETUP With these edits and placing my driver files directly into I386 I get no problems with the files being copied to System32 folder. The problem is the PC still does not install the drivers,they just sit there and I still have to manually update the drivers. This the PC does well and then I see the drivers fully install. i am using the si3132 only as an example. It does not matter which driver I experiment with,always get the same results. I also have these lines in WINNT I have looked at the drivers packs...Na dont like them what so ever. I have tested using nLite. With just adding the same drivers they do end up being installed automaticly as it were. Trouble is I can not find out what nLite is altering for this to happen. I have read many many threads on lots of forums and can not find a definate answer.. i have read a couple of articles about pointing to the .inf file. This baffles me but I am thinking this maybe the key. So hopefully somebody on here knows and can point me in the right direction.. I know XP is old. I know I can install the drivers manually. But this is bugging me now and I dont like to let things ge the better of me.. Well another long winded post from tn...Sorry....
I HAVE DONE IT.... Yes I have been messing all this time and finally I got my drivers to install automaticly with NO interaction from me what so ever.... I wont go through all the steps. i am sure you all know where to obtain the XP files and download your drivers from. i will go through the good bits as best I can. Get your chosen drivers and compress all of them. Copy these files to the source disc. I used i386\MyDrvs\lan I found out you can not use foldernames with more than 8 charecters. hence "MyDrvs" There are four files which need amending DOSNET.inf TXTSETUP.sif HIVESFT.inf WINNT.sif To be honest I am not really sure if those lines have to be added to WINNT.sif but I did and I got no popup message what so ever. So I will kepp them there. Copy all the amended files into the sourc i386 folder. Install and it should work a treat...It did for me... Any questions please ask..