nLite
Normally I don’t do posts on anything windows because, well, I don’t like to use windows. But this one was just frustrating enough that I thought a quick writeup would be good.
I am helping a coworker with their personal laptop. It is a Toshiba something or other and at boot it was saying “Error in reading the disk” (or whatever the message is, you get the point). Knoppix quickly showed that not only is the disk readable and everything there but also the rest of the system works fine. Using knoppix I fixed the windows MBR but to no avail! The silly thing still wouldn’t boot. I popped in the Windows XP CD with the intention of doing a CHKDSK but to my great aggravation, the Toshiba laptop uses a sata controller that doesn’t have a driver in the Windows XP disk. Couldn’t do CHKDSK because it didn’t see a drive. Crap.
After some searches I ran into nLite. A tool to spin up your own XP disk. You can add drivers, files, windows updates, remove windows features and even have pre-installed software. To my great joy I got the driver needed for the intel 82801 SATA controller, spun up my own disk, and now this laptop is merrily performing the CHKDSK /P which HOPEFULLY fixes this problem.
Some things to note with nLite: Won’t work under wine worth a crap. Had to fire up my Windows VM to make it work. Otherwise it is pretty straight forward. Tell it where your windows disk is and where you want to store stuff on your hard drive. It will copy the windows files over and then give you a nice list of options to customize things. Seems as though sky is the limit, although I didn’t try it past adding some drivers. At the end it will make for you an .ISO which you can burn at your leisure. From there you are on your way to getting stuff done … even though it is windows.
Tags: Application Review, Resources, Server Administration, Windows
April 5th, 2011 at 11:41 am
Do you need anything special license wise to do this? I have a broken XP disc that I have a good license for, but I can’t use my other XP disc with that license. I ended up installing both under the license for the good disc. This would be sweet to get rid of some of the windows bloat. Can you remove IE by default?
April 5th, 2011 at 11:06 pm
I don’t know of any special licensing requirements at all.
Yes, you can integrate service packs, hotfixes, remove components such as IE, msn messenger, msn explorer. I would be leary about removing IE though. XP must have IE for windows update. Something to keep in mind.
April 6th, 2011 at 3:19 pm
For some of the machines I have at work that don’t connect to the interweb, I think removing IE might be just the ticket. I’ve been trying to trim the fat from a couple of machines so I can milk them a little longer without upgrading. Budgets here are getting thinner than an Ethiopian model on hunger strike.