Installing the Custom Operating System Install Image
OK, by this point you should have an operating system disc completely customised to your requirements with your Windows product key, device drivers and any other customisations you saw fit to make. The annoying thing is that if this disc doesn’t work for you, depending on how far you get in the installation before it fails, you may have to reset back to the factory image using the System Recovery DVD in order to tweak the image again (unless you have another computer on which you can tweak the image, and you had the good sense to follow my instructions and back up the CleanInstall folder).
I strongly recommend having nothing on your D: drive (or any other partitions you have made on the internal HDD) that you aren’t prepared to lose. You may decide you want to reformat and repartition the whole disc as part of the install process which will mean you will lose any data stored on it.
Insert your new disc, which I will now refer to as the “Custom Recovery Disc”, and restart your computer.
Follow the normal procedure for installing Windows from an original CD. Press any key when instructed to boot from the CD, and let it load the drivers it needs. You don’t need to press F6 to load a RAID driver because it will already be embedded on the CD. If you get a blue screen of death (BSOD) after the initial bout of file copying, you may not have embedded the RAID drivers using nLite correctly.
The first interaction you should have is deciding on which partition you want to install Windows. If working from a current position of the factory default image you will see three partitions; the hidden one at 8111MB, and the C: and D: drives. I recommend deleting all three and creating two new partitions, C: at 50,000MB with all the remaining space going to D:. Of course this is entirely up to you, it’s just a suggestion. I always format a partition before installing Windows on it with a full NTFS format. Use a quick format if you’re impatient but it only takes a few extra minutes to do it properly.
