Outline for making a Hardware Independent XP Image

For anyone interested in building a hardware independent XP image, here is a quick outline on how to make one.

1. Install Windows XP Pro on a computer that has a multi-processor HAL.  You can determine if your computer is a multiprocessor by right clicking on "My Computer" and then clicking on "Manage".  Then go to "Device Manager" and expand "Computer".

2. Do NOT install third party drivers.

3. Collect drivers from all model desktops you will be supporting.  A good tool to extract drivers can be found here.  There are other utilities that you can use, but this is a good one you can use.  Once you have extracted the drivers from all model's put them all in a folder called "drivers".  This will go in your sysprep folder later on.


4. Setup your computer the way you want it.  Install software, create default user profile, etc.

5. Download sysprep.  You can download it here for XP SP3. After downloading the .cab file, extract all files to a folder called "sysprep".

6. Copy the "sysprep" folder to the root of C:

7. Copy the "drivers" folder with all your drivers into the sysprep folder "C:\sysprep\drivers"

8. Download the following tool and put it in your sysprep folder.

9. Read the page on how to use the spdrvscn.exe utility.  Basically you run it, point it to your drivers folder, let it scan that folder.  It then enumerates all the .inf files that are in your drivers folder and stores those path's in a registry key that will tell windows where your device drivers are during the sysprep process.

10. Go to your sysprep folder and create your sysprep .inf file.  This is the file that sysprep read during the sysprep process and will act as an answer file.  You create the sysprep.inf file by double clicking on the setupmgr.exe.  This will guide you through a wizard for creating the sysprep file.  You may need help to modify this file.  For more details on how to do this, go to this site.  There are also many KBarticles on how to do this on the microsoft site.  Search for "modify sysprep.inf" or something along those lines.

11. Once you have your sysprep.inf file ready, then run the spdrvscn.exe utility.  Enumerate the .inf files in your drivers folder and save that.

12. After you do that, then go to your sysprep folder and double click on "sysprep.exe".  Check "mini-setup" and "Shutdown".  After sysprep runs it will shut your computer down.  Be sure to capture the image BEFORE you let it boot back up into windows.

Keep in mind that this is a brief outline of how to create a universal desktop image.  You will need more information on how to create you .inf file and you may have some issues with some third party drivers.  But this should get you started if you have never attempted a universal XP desktop image.

I am currently learning how to create Win7 images and creating the unattended file with WAIK.  When I become more proficient with that, I'll post some notes on that.