After slipstreaming my SP2 CD I decided to take things a bit further and be able to automate my installation. Microsoft has everything setup so that you can automate the install process for Windows. You can even have it install a bunch of third party applications straight from the windows install CD.

First of all copy all of the contents of your windows CD to C:\winxp after this is completed download this program. This is the easiest way to create the file(s) that you'll be needing. This helps automate a lot of the install process. Ignore the tweaks part cause I won't be covering that in this article.

Open up winntsif.exe found in this file. (You'll need to have the .net framework installed on your system). Expand the Configuration section like this;

Go through each of the settings. Under Unattended you'll see where you can set the driver path, but for now lets just skip that and leave it as the default. I'll show you more to do with that later. After you've set all of that optional stuff up click on Finish which is just above Registry Tweaks.