Slipstreamed and Unattended Windows Installations - The Theory
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Before we begin, we must define the term slipstreaming. It is a technique known since the release of Windows 2000 and XP. Slipstreaming means applying the technique to combine a source-legal Windows installation CD with the necessary extra security updates, patches, service packs, and if need be, additional drivers as well. The end result of slipstreaming is another legal Windows installation CD on steroids.
It should be noted that Microsoft sells slipstreamed editions that contain the latest updates every now and then. So this is a perfectly legal and native approach for the OS. Technically, all that happens is that the source image becomes "expanded" with the additional software updates. The installation CD may become a DVD quite easily (due to its large size), but that shouldn't cause problems nowadays.
During the installation process of slipstreamed editions, the additional software and updates are also installed. This is the number one reason why slipstreaming is so powerful. It is an extremely time-saving process. Just imagine being in the place of system administrators required to deploy tens of thousands of identical copies. Network bandwidth can also be conserved during the process. Thus, it saves time and money.
There are numerous step-by-step manuals and guides available on the Internet that lead the user through the slipstreaming process for the most common packages, such as the Service Pack 2, and lately, SP3-all of these, of course, referring to Windows XP. Walking the reader through the process of do-it-yourself manually via the command line ("cmd.exe") is not really the purpose of this article.
We won't focus on that. Instead, we'll just briefly present the process to help you grasp the concepts. On the next page, we will recommend some of the most popular free third-party utilities that do the slipstreaming process automatically. You download the application, launch the utility, a fancy GUI shows up, and you can walk through the entire process with a wizard-like interface. And yes, they do the job well.
However, as mentioned earlier, we want to actually understand what happens behind good-looking graphical user interfaces. Before you do anything else, you should copy the source legit version of Windows to a reference folder. Once this is done, we download to a separate folder, practically anywhere, the security hotfixes, service packs, and updates. Then we run each (or handle them via a script) with the /integrate:<path_to_install> tag.
In the above example, replace <path_to_install> with the accurate full path of the folder where the copied source Windows installation CD is located; by doing this, the patches are integrated into the installation image. After this step, you need a boot extractor utility to grab the boot loader from the original installation CD. A freeware utility to do this is IsoBuster.
You'll find "Microsoft Corporation.img" as the bootable image. Extract it. Then launch your favorite CD/DVD burning software suite (such as Nero Burning Rom), create a new bootable CD/DVD compilation, specify the source bootable image (the one we have just extracted earlier), then add the files and folders (by selecting everything) from the slipstreamed installation. As you can see, it isn't hard...but it is time-consuming.
Windows install CDs supplied by OEMs usually cannot be slipstreamed because they are proprietarily customized already. And you should pay attention to the burning options because the following two options must not be ignored: 1.) Number of loaded sectors: 4 (this can be set in most authoring suites); 2.) "Do not add the ";1" ISO file version extension." Without these, the CD won't boot.
Now let's also explain as briefly as possible the theory behind unattended installs. In short, Microsoft allows users to automate the installation process of their apps and operating systems via so-called answer files. These are basically text files that already contain the answers to the questions that pop up during installations. As you can see, you can edit the sample answer files only once, and then use that file thousands of times.
The structure of these files is composed of headers ("[name_of_the_header]"), and then keys and values ("key = value"). By default, each Windows installation comes with a sample unattended.txt that can be modified according to your requirements. For a complete walk-through of how to build an answer file on your own, check out this Microsoft documentation. To sum up, answer files script the installation process.
On the next page we'll take a look at third party utilities that can lead the user through the slipstreaming and unattended setup-creating process in a wizard-like manner. The image will be in an .ISO ready-to-burn format. Then all you need is a blank CD/DVD media -- and of course, your favorite optical media authoring environment suite.
Next: Third Party Apps to the Rescue >>
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