Okay, so this is a simple guide that will enable you to make, for your own personal use on your own hardware (it’s even possible to restore it to other hardware or virtual machine--this is not guaranteed to work in every instance, but it does work in some), a complete Windows XP install with all your favorite programs, with all your favorite settings--completely user-customized--and use that image to "pseudo fresh install" or recover system from infection or failure on the same or similar hardware, without sysprep, using only Windows PE (1, 2, or 3.0) with gimageX.
Depending on size, one could have both their PE and custom.wim on one DVD-RW, and be able to deploy said image at any time from the disc, roughly similar to how some OEMs do it from a recovery partition running various scripts, which could also be invoked automatically at PE boot using scripts. Or from usb. Or from hdd. The possibilities are virtually limitless.
First things first--What you need:
1. a working Windows PE (preferably PE 1.0) where you can access windows disk management to be able to format a partition and keep the xp boot code, and with these files installed to the PE's system32 directory: gimagex.exe, wimgapi.dll
2. a fresh installation of Windows XP, with any and all customizations and programs you might want--Office, cleaners, clients, etc etc, and completely updated. I say fresh because it's better to work with an install that is minimally corrupted for best results when it is deployed at a later time, especially if for recovery purposes, or to get that nice "fresh, clean feeling.”
3. a flash drive, external hdd, or extra partition—just somewhere the image can be saved
MAKING THE IMAGE
Now that you have your XP install exactly like you want it, and exactly like you’d want to have it should you ever need to start from scratch once again with XP, boot into your PE disc with all the aforementioned files.
Open command prompt and execute “gimagex”
In the graphical interface choose the appropriate options for what to capture, where to store it, what to name it, etc. like so
Choosing “fast” for compression will make the image larger but it will take a shorter amount of time to produce. Choosing “maximum” will make the image much smaller (good for those trying to fit on one dvd) but it will take much much longer to produce the image.
For instance, a 7.91GB install became a 2.88GB wim using fast compression
Then click “create”
Even on a VM with only 1GB or RAM, to .wim a 7.91GB install takes roughly 15 minutes with fast compression. It’s much faster on real hardware, like 5 to 7 minutes
HOW TO RESTORE YOUR IMAGE
boot into your PE environment and go to disk management
format the drive you are going to restore your wim to
then open up gimagex again and go to the apply tab
locate your wim and choose its destination and click "apply"
wim took a little over 7 minutes to restore--much much faster than a fresh install and also installing all your software again
Note:
sysprep is needed only if you are making an image to be used on many different hardware profiles, and there are plenty of tutorials for that--this does not have that in mind, and the main goal of this is to have a complete custom image that one can use to pseudo re-install their favorite XP onto the same, existing hardware it came from