Windows XP and SP2: Slipstreaming SP2 into your Windows XP Setup Files

Tagged: Windows installation

Another handy recipe for those XP install geeks. This recipe explains how to ’slipstream’ Service Pack 2 into your Windows XP Installation and then create a bootable Windows XP w/SP2 install cd. This is nice since the slipstreaming will update your XP installation files to have SP2 applied before you install! No more downloading or updating to SP2 on new installs.

This recipe explains how to ’slipstream’ the new Windows XP Service Pack 2 into your windows xp installation files (thus you will not need to update to SP2 after new XP installations.

Requirements:
-Windows XP Installation CD
-Service Pack 2 (full “Network Install” file)
-Windows 98SE Bootdisk or image of it
-Smartdrv.exe

Note: I’d recommend using easy folders to save the files and steps in.

Step 1. Download the full Windows XP service pack 2 file.

a. You can get it here.

Download this file and save it to your harddrive (in this example, i will save it to C:\SP2 )

Step 2: Copying your XP Installation CD to your Harddrive

a. Next, insert your Windows XP installation cd into your computer. Now copy the entire contents of the CD to your harddrive. In my example, i will save it to C:\XP.

Step 3: Extracting the SP2 files

a. Create a new folder for the extracted files, in my example i will create a folder called SP2F, c:\SP2F

b. Next thing we need to do is to extract the files to this new folder, c:\SP2F. However we have to do this part in the “Command Prompt” (aka DOS Prompt)

-Go to Start Menu > Run
-Then at the Run box, type: CMD and hit Enter

(this part below assumes that you’ve used my folder locations in the example)
-at the Command Prompt, type: C: and the command prompt should change to a: C:\>
-then type: CD SP2 and the command prompt should show:
C:\SP2>

now that we are in the folder where we saved the XP Service Pack 2 .exe file, we need to extract it.
At the command prompt, type: WindowsXP-KB835935-SP2-ENU.exe -x
(the -x tells the SP2 to extract the files not to update XP)

Once you hit Enter, a new dialog box will popup.
It will ask for the location to extract the Service Pack 2 files to, click the Browse button and find the folder we created (in my example, C:\SP2F)

Let it extract the files.

Step 4: Updating/Slipstreaming SP2 files into your XP installation

Ok, so far here’s what we have done:
-Downloaded and extracted the SP2 files into C:\SP2F
-Copied the entire Windows XP Installation CD into C:\XP

Finally, to update the XP Installation CD we copied to C:\XP we need to type this command in the command prompt.

Again, open your command prompt (Start > Run > CMD )
we now will need to go to the i386\update folder of service pack 2 files we extracted.
In my example, C:\SP2F\i386\update, we do this by typing:
C:
CD SP2F
CD i386
CD UPDATE

You should now be in the C:\SP2F\i386\Update folder at the command prompt.

Now type: update /s:c:\XP

(the c:\XP is where i saved my XP installation CD files, change this if you saved yours to a different location.)

XP will now update the XP Installation CD files with SP2! Let it finish.

So now, in the C:\XP folder, we should have an updated Windows XP installation with SP2. If you use these files to install XP to a new computer, that new computer will have SP2 installed with XP.

Step 5: Creating a Bootable Windows XP with SP2 Installation CD (optional)

Just use my other recipe for creating a Windows XP Bootable CD.
Go here:

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