Windows Server 2003 (NT 5.2.3790.0) build guide

Build Preparations

• It’s recommended to disable any AV before extracting/building, as both of those actions create a lot of new files (your AV will likely try scanning every one, slowing down the extraction/build by quite a bit) - this also counts for any other tools that monitor files such as voidtools’ Everything.
• Ensure build machine date is current - there’s no longer any need to set date to 2003 or anything.
• Extract source tree to a folder named srv03rtm on the root of a drive (important, as pre-built DirectUI files will only link properly under this path), any drive letter (besides C:) should be fine, use D:\srv03rtm\ as the path to match RTM binaries.
• Unset Read-only on extracted directory, including subfolders and files (note that after unsetting this and closing/reopening the folder properties again you might see that read-only has been set again, this is fine, as long as you unset it once it should let the build work without issue)
• Extract the win2003_prepatched_v10a.zip into your source tree, overwriting existing files as necessary
• If using a 64-bit host OS to build with: copy the contents of the ZIPs _x64 folder into the source tree, overwriting if asked.
• If using this guide after Oct 2021: you’ll need to renew the test certificates used during the build first - a helpful anon has made a guide for doing this.

If your OS doesn’t use UAC (XP/2003)

• Create desktop shortcut for %windir%\system32\cmd.exe /k D:\srv03rtm\tools\razzle.cmd free offline (see below for explanation) and change Start in to D:\srv03rtm
• If using 64-bit host OS use razzle64.cmd in the shortcut instead of razzle.cmd
• Open razzle window using shortcut you created.

If your OS uses UAC (Vista+)

• Run command-prompt as administrator (can usually be done by typing cmd into start menu, right click Command Prompt -> Run as administrator)
• In the command-prompt, change to the drive you extracted source-code to by typing in the drive letter , eg. E:
• Change to the source folder: cd srv03rtm
• Now start razzle: tools\razzle.cmd free offline (If using 64-bit host OS use tools\razzle64.cmd free offline instead)

The first time you run razzle inside that copy of the source code it’ll need to initialise a few things, give it a few minutes, after a while a Notepad window will appear - make sure to close this for the initialisation to continue.

Important: Once razzle has initialised run tools\prebuild.cmd to finish preparing the build environment (only need to run once after initing razzle for first time in this tree)