Recently, while cleaning up some persistent malware on my friend's computer, I ran into a problem: her Dell desktop didn't have a floppy disk drive, and I couldn't find any way to load her SATA drivers from the Windows XP Installation CD, meaning that I couldn't use the Windows Recovery Console to log onto the hard drive and delete the offending files.

Why not? Because SATA and RAID drivers aren't included on most Windows XP Installation disks; instead, the drivers are (for some bizarre reason) still designed to be installed off of a 3.5 inch floppy disk, which more and more of us refuse to use.

If I'd had a floppy disk, I could simply hit F6 during the XP installation startup, and then load the drivers off of the floppy disk during the next step. Without the floppy drive, though, my options were limited.

Then I learned about slipstreaming. In short, slipstreaming means to take an older installation (like an original Windows XP installation CD) and "update it" - basically, add the stuff that came afterward into the installation disk.

So, you could slipstream all of your computer's drivers onto a Windows XP installation CD, meaning that you would never have to fumble around looking for drivers after a reformat again. Or you could design an XP BootCD with Ad-Aware SE on it, allowing you to boot an alternate operating system and still use your Anti-Spyware to track down lingering threats.

The problem is, slipstreaming drivers isn't easy. It's not for the faint of heart and it's not for amateurs, both of which I am. So here's a rundown of the steps I needed to take to get my Windows XP Boot Disk to work with my friend's Dell SATA hard drive:

1) I needed the SATA drivers. At Dell's website they offer them as an executable file that installs onto a 3.5 inch floppy.

2) I went downstairs and installed Dell's driver image file onto a floppy disk, then copied the actual driver files off the floppy and onto a RAM Flash Drive.

3) I took the driver files upstairs and started looking for a tutorial on slipstreaming SATA and RAID drivers. I finally found some poor bastard who actually had two different SATA adapters on his motherboard and had to slipstream both of them. His SATA slipstreaming tutorial can be found here. Since one of them was the same Intel driver that my friend used, though, I used that half of his tutorial.

4) After following his grueling and incredibly detailed instructions to the letter, I used a program called Bart's PE Builder to build an XP boot CD image from the installation files I'd slipstreamed. For good measure, I copied the driver folders into Bart PE's Drivers directory, in the RAID drivers directory. BartPE burned the image directly onto a CD-Rom.

5) When I booted from the BartPE disk, I was now able to detect and recognize the SATA hard disk, allowing me access to the filesystem so I could delete some very, very sticky malware that liked to load at startup and go write protected. A quick dash through the command prompt took me to the file, which I deleted. Voila!

Sound pretty complicated? It was. But it didn't have to be. If slipstreaming is something even a neophyte like myself can successfully accomplish, you've got to wonder why Dell doesn't put the SATA drivers on their Windows XP installation CD's. And why, when Dell knows that many users don't have 3.5 inch floppy drives, do they insist on distributing their SATA drivers as a floppy disk image?

At least in the future I know I can always give my friend the BartPE XP boot CD that I made, but what about everyone else in the world who doesn't have a floppy drive?