For anyone who has to build Windows servers on a regular basis integration of Service Packs has been pretty much a must have skill for a while now. The reason I say this is we have all been in the situation where a new server is needed now, now meaning 2 days ago… meaning that time is premium and having to apply Service Packs after the build once the server is up and running can slow you down.
Windows 2003 Release 2 offered a slightly newer challenge compared to older versions of Windows, being that it had 2 CD’s. After some googling around I found that the /integrate option of the Service Pack would actually work with both disks. So I extracted both CDs to folders on my computer and ran the integrate command:
WindowsServer2003-KB914961-SP2-x86-ENU.exe /integrate:C:\Temp\W2K3_R2_CD1
WindowsServer2003-KB914961-SP2-x86-ENU.exe /integrate:C:\Temp\W2K3_R2_CD2
This worked without any problem. So I got to thinking, that the second CD is not actually that big, so why not include that with CD1. So I went through the extraction process and put the contents of both CD’s into one folder on my PC. The size of this folder was 763MB, so this would indeed fit on a 800MB CD as well as being a good ISO. You can then integrate the Service Pack with this combined directory either using the command line method of *service pack name*.exe /integrate:*file path* or you could use this handy utility I found called nLite (http://www.nliteos.com/).
nLite is a very useful utility as this allows you not only to slipstream in Service Packs, but also standard Windows Updates, Drivers, add/remove components, unattended options, general options, tweaks (Registry and Services) and it can create a bootable ISO. So if you have to press F6 during the build to install the disk array drivers, nLite can save you this pain. nLite works with Windows 2000, XP and 2003.
I am now using a single disk/ISO Windows 2003 Release 2 (with SP2 and most common array drivers) for both physical builds and VM’s.
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