Microsoft has confirmed that there will no way to directly slipstream the Service Pack. Nevertheless, the method outlined below will still work.

the latest build of Vista SP1 released to testers (6001.16633) is in the EXE standalone update format. Many of you will no doubt be wondering as to how exactly the bits can be integrated into a Vista RTM ISO if at all possible.

There's some good news and there's also some bad news.

Microsoft has confirmed that there will no way to directly slipstream the Service Pack. Nevertheless, the method outlined below will still work.

Unlike previous service pack updates for older Windows OSes, Microsoft does not provide any switches in the EXE to allow for simple integration. Part of the problem has to do with the completely different format that the Vista Setup DVD uses where each edition of Vista is a separate index in the install.wim and that each index needs to be separately updated. While Microsoft could implement a switch to allow the user to select which index to update or a switch to update all the indexes, it will turn out to be a very lengthy and time-consuming process as we are talking about gigabytes of files that need to be updated/replaced, saved and recompressed. Unfortunately, Vista also does not implement an Updates folder unlike Office 2007 where one could stick all the latest updates in the folder in the ISO and setup would pick them up and install them.

The format of Vista SP1 as an update is broken up into 5 CAB files which the Vista SP1 installer installs on top of Vista RTM using a single EXE installer (spinstall.exe). For those of you that have been following how to integrate Hotfixes via our guide or have used vLite, there's reason to rejoice as both methods support CAB integration. Unfortunately, since the currently available tools from the Windows Automated Installation Kit (WAIK) are not designed for SP1, one runs into a few issues. Namely, the main SP1 CAB, windows6.0-kb936330-X86.cab cannot be integrated with the tools from the RTM version of WAIK (peimg and pkgmgr error out) nor can it be integrated with vLite. The updated WAIK tools from Beta 3 of Server 2008 do not work either. Some good news out all this is that the other smaller supplementary CAB files have no issues being integrated with peimg since they are using the same old internal format being used with current Hotfixes.

Until Microsoft release newer tools, that option should be avoided unless a workaround is found for the main SP1 CAB.

Long story short, if you want to integrate Vista SP1 into a Vista RTM DVD, the only option for the moment is to reverse integrate it:
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