Making and Customizing an Unattended Windows Install CD - PAGE 1

Update (March 15, 2005): I've updated the guide for nLite 0.99.8 beta 4.

The niche area of computer customization has seen a huge surge in recent years, with both big-name and small-name manufacturers not only supplying customization products ("mods"), but also sponsoring computer modification events.

This interest in customizing your computer exactly to your liking has crept into the software department as well, with an increasing amount of people tweaking, tuning, and sometimes blatantly turning on its head their operating system. These customizations range from the simple ones, such as skinning/themeing, to completely ripping out entire portions of the stock OS.

Most knowledgeable Linux/BSD users are already familiar with the power that their respective operating systems give them in terms of customization -- heck, they can compile custom kernels specifically tailored for their hardware and nothing more, create disk-less distributions that will boot off a floppy disk and act as a network gateway/router, and much, much more. Most people, however, are unaware that Windows 2000 and XP can be tweaked and tuned in a very similar fashion, though the methods are considerably different.

With the release of Windows 2000, adept users started noticing that the operating system as a whole seemed to be built in a very modular fashion. The installation process, specifically Windows 2000's last-stage installation of system components like COM+, and then the infamous "Registering components" stage that we all love, lent hints to Windows' increasingly modular design.

Closer inspection of the installation CD's "i386" directory, as well as the various setup information files contained within, shows that Windows is indeed very modular, and could most likely be customized to a large extent.

Upon the release of the first Service Pack for Windows 2000, system administrators began to discover that it was possible to integrate the updated files from the Service Pack into an installation source directory, and then burn a new Windows installation CD. Installing from this CD would result in a Windows installation that already had the Service Pack installed. This is referred to as "slip-streaming".

Microsoft's latest consumer operating system, Windows XP, builds upon Windows 2000, improving its multi-user capabilities, hardware compatibility, performance, stability, and ease of use. At the core, XP is just a refinement of Windows 2000, and allows for similar pre-installation tweaks and customizations.

In Neoseeker's Customized Unattended Windows Install CD guide, I will be showing you first-hand how to go about creating a customized Windows installation CD, including things like the removal of unwanted system components, integration of custom drivers, integration of hot fixes released since the last Service Pack, miscellaneous tweaks, and the option of making the entire installation process completely unattended. All of these will be done through the use of a freeware program that is making its rounds in the Windows customization community: nuhi's "nLite".

After the nLite stage, an explaination of the post customization process involving the burning of the resulting ISO image, as well as providing screenshots of the customized Windows installation will be covered. Some commonly-asked-about topics, such as FAT32 vs. NTFS, partitioning schemes, will be touched upon.

In a future addition to this guide, a compilation of common/popular after-installation tweaks with details about each one, as well a few additional tricks gathered over the years will be covered. Some tweaks for third-party applications will also be provided, such as the popular Coolbits registry tweak for enabling the overclocking panel in NVIDIA drivers. As a final task, a boatload of common tweaking myths will be debunked and hopefully uninformed users will stop preaching about them religiously.

Let's get started!