Zibblog

I decided the other day that since I finally have much of my condo cleaned up, organized, and otherwise fixed (at least until more plumbing issues rear their ugly hair), I should start getting more productive again. One thing that means is starting to get back into the swing of blog posting. If for no other reason than to organize my thoughts. This week should bring more content to the zibblog, but I won’t promise that the content will actually be good.

The other day, I felt like I’d gotten to the point on my windows pc where there was simply too much clutter. Too many old registry entries, half uninstalled applications, etc., so I figured that I’d reinstall windows. At this point, I put in the install CD, started up the machine, and watched it try and find a driver for my SATA hard drive. Alas, it was unsuccessful. I then remembered that when I first installed windows, I was installing onto an IDE drive which I’d replaced with the 10k rpm drive. After some searching, I found some drivers and a floppy disc image, so I figured I was all set.

If you’ve ever seen my shuttle pc, you’d know that it doesn’t have a floppy drive. This is why I keep around a floppy drive that I can connect to the motherboard in case I have to do this sort of thing. After connecting up the floppy drive, it found the correct drive, but windows still had some issues doing the install. A few google searches later, I found out about “slipstreaming” a windows installer (this is where all of my windows using friends think “duh, why didn’t you think of that in the first place”). It turns out that there are programs like nLite that will allow you to take an existing windows installer and modify it to include other drivers, service packs, etc. I was pretty impressed with how easy it was to point nLite at the drivers I had found, create a CD with the drivers included, and do the full windows installation from CD.