Fresh Installs With Fresh Hardware

Say you just bought a new motherboard, SCSI drive, or RAID card and you want to install a fresh copy of Windows onto it. If the standard Windows OS install contains drivers for it, then you can just boot from the install CD and start installing. Otherwise, you'll need to install the drivers after the install is complete, or during the install.

Installing drivers after you're done installing Windows isn't that bad if you have them on CD and you don't need them during the install. But if you're installing Windows onto a RAID array or a SCSI drive, for example, you'll need those drivers during the install, not after, because you won't be able to complete the installation without them. In my case, I just bought a new RAID card from NewEgg (this one). My plan was to make a RAID 1 (Mirrored) array for redundancy and install a clean copy of Windows onto it. But to do that, I needed the drivers to be available during the install.

Installing Drivers During an Install -- the F6 Floppy Solution

To install the drivers during a Windows install, you need to watch for the message "Press F6 to add a third party SCSI or RAID driver". The message may not be exactly like that depending on which version of Windows you're installing, but it definitely starts with "Press F6." It appears at the bottom of the screen almost right away in the install (while the screen is still blue and in text mode), and you only get a second or two to hit F6 before the opportunity is lost, forcing you to reboot and try again. The F6 method also requires you to have the drivers on a floppy, assuming the drivers will even fit on a floppy, and assuming you even have a floppy drive anymore. A USB Floppy Drive won't always work -- you really need a good ol' fashioned floppy "A:" drive. Blech.

Slipstreaming Your Windows Install CD -- a Cleaner Way

But assume you don't want to go the floppy drive route. You can instead make a "slipstream" version of your Windows install CD, which is basically a copy of the install CD that includes any extra drivers you need (RAID cards, network cards, etc). No floppy drive needed, no pressing F6, no driverless hardware after install, etc. A slipstream CD can also contain hotfixes and service packs, or even be an "unattended" version with all the install questions answered ahead of time. Note that a slipstream CD is not an illegal copy -- you must own a legal version of Windows. For those of you with MSDN subscriptions, your developer disks will work as well.

Slipstreaming used to be a PITA, but nowadays the process is easier thanks to NLite, a free utility that handles most of the dirty work. This quick & dirty guide assumes you know what driver files (.INF) are and have installed drivers and hardware before. It also assumes you know which drivers are the right ones for your hardware and OS.

Using NLite to Make the Slipstream

Anyhow, to make a slimstream CD:

1. Get your Windows OS Install CD and copy all the files into a folder on your hard drive called c:\windowsinstall or somesuch. If you have an ISO image of the install CD (as you might if you had downloaded the ISO from MSDN), you can instead use a tool like IsoBuster to copy the files from the ISO to c:\windowsinstall. Otherwise you'd have to burn the ISO to a CD and then rip the files. Moving on....
2. Download and install NLite. You'll need .NET 2.0 in order to run it.
3. Get the drivers, hotfixes, and service packs you want and save them somewhere on your hard drive. If the drivers are in an EXE (for example, platform drivers for NForce motherboards) you'll need to get them out of the EXE via winzip, or maybe by running the driver EXE and hitting Cancel after the drivers have been extracted but before they've been installed (this works for nforce drivers). Remember that the drivers are where the INF files are.
4. Run NLite.
5. Navigate to the folder containing the files from your install cd (e.g. c:\windowsinstall). NLite will scan the files and try to guess what the OS is. If it's correct, click Next.
6. You'll see a screen listing any previous NLite sessions. If you used it before it'll ask you if you want to load a previous session. In this case we're starting from scratch so click Next.
7. Now you'll see some toggle buttons where you click on all the things you want to do with your new slipstream CD. I wish NLite had them as checkboxes instead of buttons, but anyhow. If you want to learn about the options, you can read the full NLite guide. In this case we're just integrating some drivers, so click Integrate Drivers and Create a Bootable ISO (so they highlight) and click Next.
8. You'll see the Integrate Drivers screen. At the bottom, click Install. You'll see two options: Single Driver and Multiple Driver Folder.
9. Single Driver
   1. If you have one driver in a folder (which is often the case with RAID drivers), choose Single Driver and navigate to the folder, click the appropriate INF file, and click Open.
   2. NLite will auto suggest a mode (PlugNPlay or Textmode) and show the driver(s) below.
   3. Click the appropriate one and click OK. You'll see it added to the list of driver.
10. Multiple Driver Folder
    1. If you have a bunch of drivers in a single folder (e.g. NForce drivers in C:\NVIDIA\nForceWin2KXP\5.11), click Multiple driver folder.
    2. Navigate to the folder containing all the drivers and click OK. NLite will recurse through that folder and subfolders and display all the drivers it found.
    3. Highlight all the drivers you want to install and click OK. NLite may ask you to pick from a few different drivers as in the Single Driver selection, then finally drop you back to the Integrate Drivers screen.
11. Now that you've chosen the drivers, click Next. NLite will ask you to confirm, and then it'll start packing all the files together into a single install set, which might take a few minutes. Then click Next.
12. Now you'll have a chance to specify a label and attributes for a bootable ISO. Enter an ISO Label, leave the attributes alone, and click Make ISO. Choose a target directory and name, click OK, and wait as the ISO is created.
13. Once your ISO is built, go ahead and burn it to CD or DVD using Nero, Deepburner, or your favorite ISO burning program.

That's it! Now you have a customized Windows OS Install CD that you can use to install a fresh copy of Windows on your new hardware without worrying about hitting F6, missing drivers, installing drivers later, etc.

Note that with certain RAID/SATA drivers there may be extra things you need to do to slipstream them correctly. If you have install problems using the above rough guide, check out the NLite forum or MediaMan's article on Slipstreaming, especially pages 4-5.