HOWTO: Use Linux to Slipstream SP3 into Windows XP iso

A co-worker of mine inspired me to create a new enterprise CD with SP3 pre-installed the other day after I asked about an existing iso I had found on our network. I wondered if it were OEM or a new volume license with SP3 I had hoped it was.

He sent me a few links to some howto’s and not all were the same. Looking over a few examples I quickly began replacing their Windows solutions with known Linux. Rather than recreate the wheel, I first searched how others have done it using Linux. These are a couple sites that have inspired my success:

• Slipstreaming Windows XP with Service Pack 3 in Linux by Jeremy Visser

• Slipstreaming Windows XP SP3 in Linux by Michael Gorven
• Intégration du Service Pack Windows sous Linux by Jacques Rouxel

The process is actually very easy but as usual ‘your mileage will vary’. I am using KDE 4.3.0 with Fedora 10.

1. Copy XP CD content into a clean working directory (/home/warren/software/VRMPVOL_EN/)

2. chmod -R 777 /home/warren/software/VRMPVOL_EN/
3. Convert everything to uppercase with convmv -r –upper –notest /home/warren/software/VRMPVOL_EN/. Don’t ask; who’d of thunk Microsoft was case sensitive!
4. Retrieve the redistributable SP3
5. Extract the service pack using cabextract -d /home/warren/software/SP3/ /home/warren/software/WindowsXP-KB936929-x86-ENU.exe
   
   

6. Install the service pack using wine /home/warren/software/SP3/i386/update/update.exe /integrate:D:\\home\\warren\\software\\VRMPVOL_EN_SP3.

   The D: is the wine drive letter I have my existing CD in. Run the wine configuration app and find the Drives tab.

7. Extract the boot loader from the original CD with ./geteltorito /dev/sr0 > /home/warren/software/VRMPVOL_EN_SP3/boot.bin.

   I didn’t have an rpm package for geteltorito so I got both files from the download page and chmod 755 to make it executable. I could only run this as root, so be sure to chown the boot.bin back to you.

8. Write the iso with mkisofs -b boot.bin -hide boot.bin -hide boot.catalog -no-emul-boot -boot-load-size 4 -iso-level 4 -relaxed-filenames -D -V VRMPVOL_EN_SP3 -o /home/warren/software/VRMPVOL_EN_SP3.iso ./home/warren/software/VRMPVOL_EN_SP3/
9. Burn iso to CD and test! I prefer K3b; just works.

So there you have your newly update XP CD with SP3 already installed. I tested and only created one coaster with a botched boot loader. This one boots and has a clean SP3.

Linux Migration – Day Zero

My family computer is the second Dell we have had with XP Home for the kids gaming entertainment and dual booting Linux mainly for my doing the books. Under XP we have used open source applications for the most part: Firefox, Thunderbird, OpenOffice.org. So off to a great start for migration.

Prior to allowing kids to play on the computer my wife had been using Linux with our first Dell. Then she just stuck with XP instead of having to keep rebooting for the kids. They had acquired many educational and gaming CD’s over the years.

Recently I have inherited two higher end machines yet only one is complete and another just a cpu and motherboard. I have plans to use one for the family and the other for a server. Problem is I don’t care to shell out for a new XP license. I got by with the second Dell we inherited because we simply just plopped in our drive from the first Dell and kept on going. These new machines are not Dells.

Hashing out Samba

I just recently wrestled with my little smb setup here to tighten the grip on who might be accessing my share. My intention is to simply share my own smb share I have running in VmWare with my XP host. My XP host is logged into a domain server not to the local machine. The Linux I have installed in VmWare is FC5 running from USB drive and using the NAT networking setting. My company has blocked DHCP to only those machines authenticated with by the domain server. I originally used the KDE Control Center to setup my smb sharing homes. However I felt a bit uncomfortable with the possibility of people with remote desktop access being able to drop into my share. So I created a new share with access to only part of my /home space. I had great difficulty with the KDE Control Center giving access to this new share. For some reason I was simply not able to authenticate into it.

So I prefer/suggest using swat to configure SAMBA. Starting with a clean slate, I removed the homes share and printers. Prior to all this I added my user via the terminal console: ‘smbpasswd -a johndoe’. This is very similar to adding a new system user. Also I used the same user as my existing system user; not sure why but it doesn’t like non system users being added, go figure.

Some non SAMBA defaults from the stock FC5 samba RPM I am using are depicted in my smb.conf file below:

# Samba config file created using SWAT
# from 127.0.0.1 (127.0.0.1)
# Date: 2007/03/02 13:56:48

[global]
        workgroup = WD
        netbios name = USB
        server string =
        username map = /etc/samba/smbusers
        log level = 1
        server signing = auto
        preferred master = No
        domain master = No
        ldap ssl = no

[USB2]
        path = /home/warren/software/Xfer
        read only = No

Also I am not using the same workgroup as my windows xp pro domain host is using. In xp, I browse the network neighborhood and into my WD workgroup I find the USB share and browsing to it pops up the authentication window. I choose not to save password. I also don’t map to this share. What I do is create a shortcut to the \\WD\USB\usb2 share and have it on my Desktop or quick links toolbar. In the morning I click it and it asks for authentication and am set for the day. No worries about IP address or XP home or XP pro here at work or at home; it all just works.

Vaio Wrestling

I somehow got “voluntwisted” into fixing a coworkers Sony laptop. Well okay maybe it was my own doing. I love to recover data from presumed dead hard drives. His had been dead and powered up for so long, I presumed it was toast like so many laptop drives usually are. Much to my surprise it was mountable using an old Live Knoppix disk. So I simply plugged in my USB drive and with MC I did mass copies to it. Since it was a bad disk it did take about 8 hours to move about 2GB of data (music and pictures).

So next the coworker produced a replacement drive. One dilemma though… he didn’t have his recovery CD’s since he just moved here and having a tough time finding anything really. So I thought I’d try using my home Dell PC. OEM CD’s tend to require you to use their own hardware to do the installs so my XP Home disk would have to be installed using my PC. Ordered a laptop to IDE converter from RadioShack online; as they don’t carry them in the stores. All is well. Got that installed and next I plopped it back in the Sony. No go. CRAP! It’s an AMD. I used an Intel PC not to mention possible disk parameter differences. Back to the drawing board.

Now the coworker produces the CD’s! Well actually he produced them before I put the drive back in the laptop, but I already had finished the install with all the updates and transferred his data in at that point. They would be handy I’m sure.

So I booted up with the Vaio System Recovery Utility CD and get some dll sys file error. Doing a little research on the exact code I find other related pointing at the RAM. Others had simply re-socketed it but that did not fix my problem. I have an old copy of W2KPro so I stuck that on in hopes to prove the drive was ok and the CD drive was working fine. I attempted to copy the Recovery CD’s to the drive and it failed to read. So the disk is bad? I put the laptop drive back in my Dell PC and boot with the Recovery CD and it read fine but soon failed with a “blue screen of death”. Most likely because it wasn’t Sony hardware. Back to the drawing board again.

So I have a faulty CD drive, Original Sony Recovery disks, and no way to get it going.

Next I used the Live Gparted CD and smacked it clean. I created a small 2GB FAT32 partition and the rest NTFS. Using my USB DVD drive I copied the Recovery disks to the FAT partition and set it with a boot flag. Tried to boot but it complains it can’t find a bootable OS. CRAP! Something I’m missing about the way CD’s are bootable I’m sure. BTW, this is new enough P4 but can’t boot from USB. I have since re-partitioned and re-formatted using Gparted and re-installed W2KPro and find that it fails to boot on the first reboot after installing to the Gparted NTFS. So make a mental note of this. BTW letting the installer do the format (which takes a good hour or two!) proves the Gparted NTFS is not perfect.

So what is next? Running out of options. I found a retail version (I believe) XP Home CD but doubt it’s English. I guess I need to call Sony to see what they have to offer.

The Match is Over

This afternoon I went in search of speaking to a Sony support tech. and found they have chat support. The first guy read my request and promptly forwarded it on to another. Then the java based chat seemed to wig out on me so I had to kill Firefox and try again. This time I got a third guy and I noticed the exact same canned greeting and responses. Even the reply to some questions seemed robotic. Saying “no I don’t have the laptop with me” prompted a “Sorry about that” response.

My goal in talking with them was to find out if there was an alternative to using the boot CD. Hoping maybe there was a floppy alternate. Also to find out if the non working CD required the hidden Sony partition or not. None of which I believe the techs understood. This is a bit goofy too: the hours are from 8am to 3am EST. Why not just be 24/7?

This evening I couldn’t help but to try booting the OEM disk again to no avail. I guess if anything just to record the exact error messages this time. One think the tech mentioned; and pissed me off about was his suggestion to “purchase” the CD’s. As if I didn’t already tell him I have the CD’s already. But this got me to think “maybe I’ll just recreate them”. Using Linux of course and ‘dd if=/dev/cdrom of=vaio-cd1.iso’. Then burn the iso to CD-R. BINGO! That did the trick but not without a last jab back at me. I didn’t have to create all CD’s; just the first one. After finishing the installation, the reboot fails to just a black screen and a blinking cursor. No error or drive activity. Then I remember there was an option to do it custom or more advanced options method. After peeking at the partitioning using Gparted, I noticed the same scheme I previously set possibly untouched. So the second install I chose the custom method which let me choose partition size control and this time I stuck it to the mat.

Butting Heads with IT

Okay I said I would do some explaining. I don’t want this to get long so I’ll try to summarize.

My coworker who does GIS work here is using a workstation formerly used by another former employee. This PC has seen its day I think. All the form boxes in applications and websites are out of proportion and sorta smooshed into other text. I took a stab at figuring out what it was to no avail. Okay that was short and sweet. Then recently a couple apps started popping up the Windows installer every time the Desktop was accessed. Thinking he must have some spyware or virus, I scanned his machine and ultimately uninstalling one of the two troubling apps to work with one at a time popping up. As administrator things seem to work fine after going through the install motions but only for that session and IT has these locked down so that users can’t do installs. So in one effort to fix that dang form box monitor resolution issue, I install a different video driver and viola! it is fixed. Install one of the pissy apps and wham it’s all crap again.

This box has seen its day! So after finding the resource CD’s I format/reinstall from custom corporate CD’s and install Firefox, Gimp and Google Earth. Then I logged it into our domain but can’t add the computer to the domain as I didn’t have permissions. So I call IT and give them the scoop and all hell breaks loose. At one point I had to stop him (the IT guy) and tell him to spare me the lecture as I just knew I should have called them from the start. Me knowing me and they not, I didn’t want to waste time sending the machine across the States. This issue has been looked at once before to no avail. Heck if I didn’t know what I was doing I wouldn’t have been so stupid to think I could just TRY and see if I could fix it. The best way to fix Windows has always been to format c:\ right?

Well after all that he logged in remotely and called back to ask what the hell some of those apps I installed were. He asked about Gimp and 7zip then said Firefox is not allowed and he proceeded to uninstall it. To shorten further; he couldn’t get the box to register with the domain and INSISTED I send the box overnight to them.

Before they got the PC in their hands I sent him an apology email saying I was sorry for not staying within my domain and on and on. I didn’t want them to hold a grudge over my coworker is spite of me.

About two weeks later the whole company gets an email:

Good Afternoon,

The IS Department has noticed several employees have installed browsers such as Firefox on company machines.

We ask that you do not install or use any browsers other than Microsoft’s Internet Explorer Version 6 (please do not upgrade to Version 7).

If you have installed any browser other than IE6, please remove them from your machine.

Thank you.

IS Support

My immediate response remains in my Drafts folder today in efforts to bite my lip.

Admittedly I was one of those who had Firefox installed and have since removed upon request stated below. However I would like to understand where the IS department is coming up with this decision. Before I state my opinion, I think it is necessary to give a brief background history of my usage.

I have been a Netscape user from the start before Internet Explorer ever made the scene. Remaining faithful to the line using the Mozilla suites into this day with Firefox. I have supported the online community in seeking bug fixes and support for users. This has always been the good nature of the Open Source community. I advocate Firefox as a far superior application to any other web browser.

To mention any of the shortcomings of Internet Explorer would be preaching to the choir assuming you know its history. I am not saying that Firefox is bug free either. One main difference is that bug fixes are applied within hours not days or even weeks that IE bugs go unfixed. The fact that IE 7 is not recommended yet by IT folks is the same you acknowledge. I understand that IS should disapprove IE 7 solely on the basis that it has not been tested with Webapps. Personally I use IE just for such purposes. Firefox does not work with sites requiring DirectX and luckily there are very few of those sites out there. But to assume that that should be the only use employees’ venture to the Internet is far from reality. I know this is where I should state why I could not live without Firefox when it comes to performing my job. I have thought long and hard about what answer to give, but no I truthfully don’t other than it has been a long time preference of mine. One of my previous careers as a Systems Administrator I converted the office to Mozilla for web and email. As an ISP business support, I advocated proper use of Firefox and helpful/powerful extensions available; suggesting to customers to use it as well in efforts to help keep spyware and other malice off their computers. Detection and removal tools alone should not be the sole method for fending from these attacks. Not placing the target (IE) on your back is the answer.

I hope you and the IS staff will do the homework and re-consider this decision. It’s a great tool full of productive and secure features by default.

Thanks for you time,

So anyway this is most not all of my relations with our company IT staff.

The Pain of Conviction

The Men’s Mentoring Ministry meeting went off last night. Got out about 10PM. Made for a long evening spent at the church with the normal Wednesday night service before that. I mentioned what I guessed the meeting would be like yesterday. I wasn’t too far off! What I feared most was that we’d all be lined up and those in the known click crowd would be team members and hand pick from those on the wall for teammates. But as I had guessed it… the place was packed with very ambitious guys wanting to disciple and mentor. That is awesome you know! A rather large number on hand were very open about speaking out and even against some ideas. Today I (as one who didn’t speak up) emailed the leader of the ministry my thoughts and suggestions. As I am already a part of a couple mentoring groups wasn’t looking for more ppl. I wanted more resource information and training opportunities. The outcome of this meeting has possibly opened my accountability partners eyes to a real need for commitment in getting together. We both suffer sins of the flesh yet need mentors ourselves.

The home PC is still not working in Windows. I had gone into safe mode and removed the hotfix driver and the hardware device listing. Again… in normal mode it detected the device and installs it. Up to the install everything runs fine, but after it’s installed it crawls again. Checking the BIOS I only have the option of PCI or AGP as the video selection. Oddly I did notice the on-board NIC was enabled which I changed, as well as sound was disabled!?! Sound was never a problem however and to the best of my knowledge the change made no difference. So I’m running out of plans. I guess next I just need to go with the flow. You know… “can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em”. Well I will try deleting the Matrox driver and keep the Intel installed or just dump them both. Then try reinstalling the Matrox drivers later. Currently the display properties do show that it is using the Matrox drivers. My guess is that a shared library got overwritten.

Got some progress out of the QC wireless today! Found a driver and firmware update available. The new config utility works great and easier to get around in. Only one problem and that is it’s a bit slower in bringing up the network. But hey, it beats having to set the WEP password every boot.

This week must have had a hex put over the DLT tape backup unit. Friday one workstation was turned off by mistake. Monday the boss turned his PC off. Tuesday had a tape failure. Wednesday I accidentally left the tape cleaner in the drive. However I was able to remember that type of error will start the job the moment it gets a writable tape and so I had the correct tape in for Wednesday. Tonight will prove the broken spell. I should ping the bosses PC since he left on vacation…

Yet another virus out this afternoon! ClamAV calls it Worm.SomeFool, Symantec coins it W32.Netsky.B@mm. So far we have had only four.

This afternoon I offered a suggestion to the church IT manager. Currently the sermons online are in the RealAudio format. It is also packaged as a streaming method. I mentioned that several ppl have asked me how to download them. This proves to be a much larger task for them than they expected. View the ram file for the actual URL and wget the ra file to your disk. Then I run a vplayer command that plays it through RealAudio to a wav file, then I use that to burn an audio CD. What’s so hard about that? So I suggested offering a couple quality versions of a mp3 format. He took the bate! So now he wants me to draw up a plan for the transition. We don’t want to scare the folks already used to this system at hand. Cool, then we could measure the stats to see what ppl like. Now if I could figure how to incorporate using Linux to do this from home. Time to think about this now.

More Hodge Podge Topics

Not a good start this morning. Didn’t even finish shaving this morning before my computer trouble found me! Kassie had trouble booting up the home PC. We have a Dell 2350 with a 15″ flat panel and a add in NIC and add in graphics card. Sometimes that on-board stuff is just crap! The on-board video couldn’t handle high end colors and resolution even in Windows. The on-board NIC kept freaking out in Linux causing me to restart the network to repair. All that got very tiring. So I looked at the Windows updates manually last night and saw a video driver was available. Installed and reboot… into Linux then and wrote yesterdays post and shutdown for the evening. So this morning as Kassie boots up, Windows sat at a black screen. I remove the driver in safe mode but upon entering normal mode again it reinstalled and instantly brought the PC to a crawl. 10 to 8AM and I just couldn’t wait to fix it. So no games for the kids today. However Linux is running just fine. Kassie hadn’t been in her profile for quite some time now. But I did see she had done some emailings. So this evening maybe I can get to that turtle and rip out the hotfix. If not then I’ll have to just reinstall the other drivers once again to override it.

Today at work… The banner ad cleanup seems to be working fair. Nobody has come complaining to me yet. I have seen a few blank spots on pages where the ad should have been but some of these folks need about a week to figure that something was wrong.

Looks like I’m going to get bumped down to #9 in the Gallery forum. Paour is firing off messages like a mad man! He has just released a major release for the Gallery Remote and of course, the trouble tickets come roaring in. I haven’t been in that arena for a bit. My last glitches were proven to be too much for me to debug with him.

I got on an online chat panel with Linksys this afternoon. Trying to troubleshoot the dang wireless access point. This gal didn’t provide a lick of knowledge on the the topic. All she could offer is restart the AP. Or can you ping it? I ended up changing it to use no WEP and it works. I did find that the authentication method had to be set to “both” as in open and (I assume) shared. Seems setting it to either one of those would not work. In that event of turning off WEP I had to re-enter the new keys and noticed key one was different. I should have known. Some how it was buggered up and that was probably it. But as usual around here… nothing ever goes without something else breaking. The QC dept. PC now connects to the secure AP but not after a reboot. So in attempts to go back to the insecure AP I can not get it to connect there at all now. I wrote a note to leave the PC powered one with it working on the secure network. Another priority job to tackle I guess.

The boss is leaving again tomorrow so I need to sync up his “My Documents”. This proves to be a slow and tedious task. I tried using rsync but then I would need to mount both PC’s and that proved to be another stumbling block. Cant seem to mount the damn XP laptop! I’m sure I had this idea once before, but I don’t recall what part I stumbled on. Transferring via MS Networking between XP and 2000 also proves to be tedious. Seems MS had a patch that screwed up network performance.

I just might not get to the home PC. I have church this evening and then a mens mentoring meeting afterword. That should be odd. Guys can’t do much before the comfort level increases. I have a feeling the place will be packed with guys who want to mentor rather be mentored. Well we all need some level of mentoring… it’s just a matter of pride I guess.

Ground Hog Day Returns…

Got to a particular spot in my Windows installations on the bosses new Dell today and lost count of the reboots and “hmm… lets try it this way this time”. Still trying to break the spell!

Second day of unconfiguring Windows…

This morning started off on the Windows box by running defrag a second time after I left it running last night defragging. Had a bit-o-trouble getting it to go online since the Internet Config Wiz was broke. Seemed to have this kind of trouble with various apps since we came down from Windows ME to 98SE. Finally found one wizard to work from it’s exe and off to the races I went! The bosses son only called me two times today asking how I was doing

Backing up nightly pays off. I had converted another user here at the office from the old Netscape to Mozilla for email. I normally don’t remove the old email app until I know they are happy with Mozilla. Today he accidentally goes into Netscape and proceeds to delete all his Inbox email. Now we run most email from an IMAP server and he doesn’t have a Trash box, it just deletes. Needless to say he waxed them. Fortunately he had read the new ones for the morning and didn’t need them anymore. I keep an rsync copy on my workstation. Every night via cron job, it syncs up and another cron job BRU puts it to my local tape drive. Since he come to me quick enough I only needed to transfer from my rsync copy not the tape. Quick and easy! I thank Scott D for that idea; he does just about the same thing at his office

A little worried that a discussion on the Gallery forum I help moderate was turning sour. Had a user complaining of a “heavy security bug” with the Nuke version of Gallery. Well there isn’t a Nuke version; the standalone just plugs into some CMS web apps. “I do understand your concern Prokurist, but you’re sounding as if this was [is] some commercial software at the mercy of it’s paying customers (copyright). This is the gnu generation (copyleft).” I thought that was kind of a classic response

The rough beginning

Yesterday I had attempted to start my blog but after writing it all afternoon, I had to open a second tab in Mozilla to do some admin stuff to get this going. In the process of doing that I had closed the tab and tried continuing my writing on the original tab. Well I suddenly lost the data probably due to the closing of all cache related to this site when closing the previous tab.

I don’t plan to re-write it. All it was about is past and future projects I have. As it is anyway, it’s my nature to go into too much detail as it is when talking about something. But then again it’s my nature to not give enough detail at times too. Never a happy medium.

So this blog is about my daily doings in the computer world. It may include what I have been doing with Windows boxes too. But for the most part my daily work is structured around Linux.

Today started off at the bosses house at 8am. His son called last night with major computer problems. No mouse and huge fonts and icons. Come to find out that something hosed his registry so I needed to take it into the office. It had ME on it and I put 98SE on it this afternoon. Almost had to ax the whole windows directory as it took several tries to install and it kept pulling in data from the corrupt OS.

I plan to install a Linux VPN server (FreeS/WAN) at the bosses house so while I was there I took a peak at their cable modem setup. The new home (mansion) has a hidden network control panel so I couldn’t see everything. I got the info I needed anyway by finding the Linksys DSL/Cable router. Next is to call them up to make plans to incorporate it.

Got a used HP lj5 from another Linux user in Colorado today. We got it for $250 and it has 109580 pages, so I hope that is considered low mileage. It was a nightmare to get it shipped because UPS thought we were going to print the labels her and mail it to them to affix then call UPS back up to pick the box up. What we wanted was for them to supply the label, have the driver affix the label and have the driver bring it to us and have them bill our account for this. It’s called a “one time pick up”. I thought the USPS was bad!

The boss had another guy pull some old equipment down from the loft about a week ago and placed them on pallets in the shop getting them ready for the dumpster. I had gone through testing the PC monitors for good/bad. Also want to get rid of all the IBM terminals from our old setup. Ironically I got a call from Computer Management International asking for used equipment to buy or sell. Had to call them back up today to light a fire under them so I could get rid of these! Everyone thinks this is my mess I drug out into the shop as the bullets fly.