Disclaimer: The following is to be done at your own discretion. The following may or *may not* be legal according to the fuzzy lines drawn up by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. I would recommend that you use the following information according to your own conscious. While you may not be violating the Windows license, the Digital Millennium Copyright Act may still apply here. You have been warned.

Today I am going to show you how to “Slipstream a Service Pack” so that every installation of Windows XP will already have SP1 ready to go. This is a must in corporate environments and pretty darned handy for smaller business networks, as well.

Let’s get started!

1. Download yourself a copy of the Network Install for Service Pack 1 from this location. Then save it to a new folder that you can get to easily like C:\XP-SP1 for instance.
2. OK, now you are ready to copy the entire contents of your Windows XP CD to your hard drive. A good folder to create might be something like C:\Win-XP-CD or something to that effect.
3. Now you will need to create a folder to extract the SP1 file to. You might consider something like C:\XP-SP1-extracted or whatever. Now go ahead and open a command prompt and type the following; cd C:\XP-SP1 (use appropriate folder name here, it must be where the SP was downloaded to). OK, you are rockin’ now! Now, here is where it gets cool. Type service pack filename -x and you will see a little window pop up.
4. In this little box, type the folder location you want the SP to be extracted to. For instance, C:\XP-SP1-extracted. Then click “OK.”
5. Now you are going to need to change the name of the folder that the files were extracted to into a folder named update, for instance you will see this once in the update directory;
   C:\update> or what ever your folder path is. Just add this so that it looks like so:
   C:\update>update /s:C:\Win-XP-CD
   Then press enter and it will do it’s thing. You will then get a confirmation and hit OK.

Wrapping this up

You will need to create a bootable CD with your favorite CD burning software.

1. You will need to extract the boot loader from the original Windows XP CD. Now for the sake of consistency, I am going to explain how to do this on ISO Buster. With the ISO Buster program open and ready to go, choose the icon Bootable CD, and right-click Microsoft Corporation.img
2. From your ISO Buster menu, choose to extract Microsoft Corporation.img to the Win-XP-CD folder.
3. now since we all have different CD burning software, versions, etc. I cannot be that specific. In your software, choose to create an ISO Level 2. (ISO 9660)
   I would also recommend that you keep the volume label set to its original default.
4. Drag all of the files from *inside* of the Win-XP-CD folder to the pending ISO project window. Then start the burning process. Once you are done, you have a Windows XP CD that is slipstreamed with Service Pack 1! Pretty cool, huh?

[Matt Hartley]