I just finished creating a slipstream (with unattend) Windows XP with SP3 CD. If it works it will be pretty cool. Ubuntu was slowly driving me bonkers and I sort of missed Windows XP, but knew my XP install on the other partition was aging quite a bit, and I really did not want to do a “fresh and clean” install of either Windows XP SP0 or of one of the patched versions. I have like 14 keys for Windows XP, about 7 of which are for SP0, so I decided to take one of the old ISO images and turn it into an SP3 CD, using one of the keys for SP0.
At the moment I am at one of the blue and white install pages, waiting for Windows to format my drive to take the new OS. I have moved all of my old data from my local documents and settings folder for myself, so hopefully I got everything I will need from the system. Since I know the chances of getting back into Ubuntu after this are quite low, I went ahead and backed up everything I cared about from my previous installation (primarily my Alpine data and FSTAB). When backing up my Alpine data it occurred to me that it is one of the few applications I can not run on Windows that I will likely go looking for at some point, but with that, I could always PuTTY into the Suse [virtual] machine on the network and run it from there.
If everything works as it is supposed to, once the drive is formatted, Windows will install itself (fully integrated SP3), join the domain (by itself) and then wait for me to log in. All of my drivers (I hope) are already on the CD, so all Windows has to do is map them to hardware and include them in its database. If everything works, then once I get into Windows, the system should map drive S: to my server and launch the installs for Firefox, Thunderbird and Windows Live (for Windows Live Writer).
If all goes well tonight and I get XP back running, then I will get Ubuntu reinstalled either later tonight or in the morning. I had some thermal issues with my laptop last time I installed Ubuntu, and it also installed larger than I would have liked, so I am likely to try to customize it a little more, since I now know most of what I am looking at.
On to the Unattend!