Upgrade a Windows XP Recovery CD to a full installation one

Many hardware companies sell their systems with a windows xp recovery cd which makes it most of the time impossible to install that operating system on a different system. This forces the user to either buy a new XP system or at least a standalone XP Cd, that is, unless you do what I’m going to explain here. The following steps create a bootable standalone installation system for your operating system that is not connected to the computer you purchased it with.

You only need one tool and the recovery CD of course. Download the tool XP Iso Builder and install it on your system. Create a temp dir for the new CD on your hard drive, name it XP for instance. Copy the complete recovery CD to the temporary folder. Make sure you copy hidden and system files as well. (check in folder options that they are shown when you browse dirs).

You might want to delete the folder $OEM$ in the temporary directory, it contains software that the manufacturers added to the recovery cd. Those software is normally not needed.

Start XP Iso Builder and click on the button convert recovery disk. Select your operating system under (1), browse to the temp dir in (2) and click on Search through hard drive automatically in (3). The i386 folder should be at least 420 megabytes in size, if more than one is found select the one with that size. The folder has to be on your hard drive and not in the temp XP folder that we created before.

Select start to begin the process and close when it is finished. Click on Start Choose Folder / Drive in the main window and select the temporary folder that we created. Select No afterwards.

Integrate Service Pack 2:

If your recovery CD does not contain Service Pack 2 you could integrate it to automatically have a up to date windows. Download Windows XP service pack 2 Network Installation Package for IT Professionals and Developers. Save the file to your hard drive and select Integrate Service Pack in XP Iso Builder. Browse to the file and select it, the integration of the service pack should begin.

Download and integrate Updates:

After we have integrated the service pack we surely want to integrate the newest updates for the operating system as well. The easiest way would be to upload a update pack that contains all updates since the release of service pack 2. One location to download that file would be the winboard website. Unpack the downloaded file on your hard drive and select the entry (8) Service Updates from the xp iso builder menu.

Browse to the folder that you unpacked the files to and hit ok once you are done. All updates will be added to your installation, this might take some minutes.

Once this is done we are ready to create the iso image

Create the actual ISO image:

Select (11) Finish from the menu and click on start integration. Select a filename and the creation starts.

After this is done you are ready to burn the iso to a cd with a tool like Nero for instance.

That is it. You created a full windows xp installation cd from your recovery cd and may now install it on different computers.