Thank you for explaining this. This is something new I've learned
that will probably be useful many times.
So are you saying that if you integrate, you don't have to first
integrate SP1 or 2 to the RTM and then do SP3? You can just do SP3?
Nothing I read worked, and I'd given up but was still thinking about
the topic and now I may have come up with my own method, but it
depends on details about the integration that I'm not certain about.
I use the -e option for xpsp2 (and iirc also for xp gold) and
extract all the files into directory structures that, by the design
of Windows, match each other.
Then I copy all the SP2 files to the XP RTM files, replacing any one
for which there is a file in SP2***. If I call the integrated
folders F, Then I do the same thing with SP3, integrating it onto
F. Then I plan to make a bootable CD out of that using one set of
slipstreaming instuctions.
***I do this in a DOS box. (I think maybe one can use the COPY
command, and use /Z to force it to overwrite a file without asking
if I want it too. I think even more likely I could use XCOPY with
the /Y parameter to overwrite without asking, and /R to overwrite
read-only files.) But I know I can use the 3rd party program
XXCOPY with the /CLONE paramenter which does a file-by-file copy and
copies everything no matter what, and with the /Z0 parameter which
prevents anything from being deleted from the destination folder (or
drive).
So my question is, Is there something I don't understand about
integration that is causing me to think my method will work, when it
won't??
For a while yesterday, I thought that maybe .cab or .ca_ files in
sp2 could have more files within them than did the same-named .cab
file in SP3, so that replacing the .cab file from SP2 with one from
SP3 would mean in practice not installing a file at all that would
have already been installed with SP1 or 2 if I had built the
installation CD a file at a time, instead of a .cab file at a time.
Apparently that's not actually a problem?
I thought yesterday that slipstream.exe did expand .cab files and
that's what made it better than my method.
So, if I have explained this clearly enough, were my worst thoughts
right? Or should my method also work?????
Is there some obstacle to my method that I haven't considered yet??
**Your're not the only one who says integrating the service packs is
easy, but i've tried 2 or 3 methods described on the net (2 of them
recommended on this ng, and another by googling, but even though
there are 3 descriptions, there are basically only two methods). I
ran them mostly on two different computers both win2000, and they
never worked for me. Not only did I try at least 6 complete times,
but that only counts the times it went to completion. I'm not
counting the times I made mistakes and had to start over. The
first method used the file update.exe, found deep in the
directories of the SP, to do the integration, and for me, it always
ended with some sort of error message. Then I learned about
slipstream.exe and I tried that a few times. It took a while to run
the first half of the progress bar, but the second half showed
litte or no progress and then ended suddenly. with the progress bar
still barely more than half-way from the start. When I looked at
the files in the output directory, they all had the original gold
dates, 2001 and earlier, and none of the dates of SP2, mostly in
2004, or SP2, 2006 iirc.
Eventually I concluded that slipsteam.exe was itself running
update.exe, the same program that woudln't work for me, or something
simimlar, because the final result was the same.
You definitely answered my priior post's questions. I hope you can
answer this one's.
