Multi-Boot and Windows PE

[ajb666]

Hi all, I've had a browse through these forums on and off for a while and I've finally got off my behind to ask a few questions and throw out some ideas.

/BeginRant

I'm most interested in multi-booting WinPE as a more useful alternative to the Recovery Console.

My first attempts gave me a NTFS formated hard drive which could multi-boot either the Recovery Console, WinPE or WinXP. I use this on my main test system and occasionally connect it directly to systems I'm checking.

Now my second attempt is based on a FAT32 formatted external USB drive. Firstly, I managed to get EITHER a multi-boot of Recovery Console & Windows 98 OR WinPE. I found that there seems to be some compatibility issues between using BOOTSECT.DAT/NTLDR/NTDETECT.COM, CMDCONS & Minint of different versions of WinPE and/or associated operating systems (see my comments below). Now, using the CMDCONS, WinPE, etc. - all from WinXP SP2 - it all works fine. Shame full WinXP won't boot.

So this is what I did:

1) Format drive on a Windows 98 system, sys it, fdisk /mbr, etc. and check it can boot to the C:> prompt. (There are other ways to format like the Dell and HP USB memory utilities, for example.)

2) Copy over any useful DOS utilities and drivers, add CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT if required.

3) Copy over the i386 from WinPE, rename to Minint

4) Copy over the i386 from WinXP, rename to XPSP2

5) Boot up the drive -> now in DOS

6) Copy over the NTDETECT.COM & SETUPLDR.BIN from Minint, rename SETUPLDR.BIN to NTLDR.

7) Reboot -> now in WinPE.

8) Run WINNT32 /cmdcons from the XPSP2 directory.

9) Copy BOOTSECT.DAT from CMDCONS to root.

9) Edit the BOOT.INI to include the following:

C:\BOOTSECT.DAT="WinPE"

C:\CMDCONS="Recovery Console"

C:\="DOS/Win98"

10) Reboot and everything should be inplace!

Could someone could check this and report back? I have a feeling I've missed out a step somewhere

Here are some things I have discovered in my virtual travels I think may be of interest and/or relevance. Assuming a formatted drive with MBR and an active partition, discounting the filesystem (only affects Win98, your mileage may vary) and the physical medium (USB is fine IF the BIOS properly supports it AND the external device properly conforms to mass storage specifications)

If I place the i386 directory from a WinXP or Win2K3 server CD onto the drive with the NTLDR(SETUPLDR.BIN)/NTDETECT.COM from WinPE it boots straight into Setup without any copying which one would get, for example, booting up basic DOS and then running WINNT.EXE from the i386 directory. This is probably old news but I thought it a handy thing to mention. It might be worth considering to have a standard Ghost image of this simple setup instead of an install CD given the installation will be that bit quicker.

I can't quite work out the deal with the BOOTSECT.DAT. When setting up the USB drive I originally just copied over the CMDCONS directory from my first drive. This just made the Recovery Console hang after the boot menu. I then changed the setup to boot WinPE (minus the boot menu as mentioned above) then ran WINNT32 /cmdcons which installed the relevant files and brought the boot menu back. There seems to be a difference between the BOOTSECT.DAT in XP, XP SP1, XP SP2, 2K3 & 2K3 SP1. Could anyone shed some light on this?

Also, can anyone quantify the actual difference between say the default NTLDR/NTDETECT.COM of XP SP2 and the SETUPLDR.BIN/NTDETECT.COM of WinPE (for XP SP2.) Obviously one gives a boot menu and the other goes straight into the Minint or i386 directory but I always want to find out the "why?"

If anyone's stumbled across a comprehensive explaination of the boot process I think it might be useful to post the link here!

Coming back to booting full XP or 2K3 the STOP 0x0000007B error is due to the O/S enumerating the USB devices... by first reseting the USB bus. It's like cutting off your legs to see if you're wearing trainers! It may be that this issue will be fixed in W2K3 SP1 although slipstreaming RC1 of the service pack onto a W2K3 CD makes no difference from my testing. There is a mention on Microsoft's support site about a hotfix that can be requested for a related problem with USB CD-ROM drives:

Knowledgebase Article 839210

If anyone has these hotfix files or is "in" with Microsoft and can get them please share and help us realise the dream of booting straight to WinXP from USB

While I'm rambling, if I did have a XP running off my USB drive, I'd use XPLite to reduce the footprint close to that of XP Embedded. Sorry to promote software on here but XPLite can get rid of driver caches and almost all of Internet Explorer with just a few mouse clicks, otherwise its a case of heavy registry hacking.

/EndRant

Best Regards,

Andy

[stepe]

Hi,

thanx 4 Ur instructions

BUT it didn't work 4 me

Nevertheless, I finally made it!

I've an 1 GB stick with syslinux bootmenue, with pe2usb I finally got xppe running.

Then I tired the cmdcons...it took me almost a day

So finally I had to format my stick with the HP-tool as fat16. Then I backed up the bootsector with mkbt as bootsect.dat.

I tried diffrent versions of the ntldr. Only the ntldr from a sp2 patched XP cd worked.

ntldr & ntdetect.com have 8/03/04 timestamp

ntldr is 246 kb and ntdetect is 47 kb

Next steps: copy the backed up bootsector to cmdcons.

Copy setupldr.bin from cmdcons to root and rename it to cmldr

Edit cmdcons/bootsect.dat with hexedit: change NTLDR to CMLDR

Copy boot.ini to root: Add C:\cmdcons\bootsect.dat="XP-CMDCONS" /cmdcons

So the bootsector loads NTLDR with boot.ini bootmenue. The menu loads the modified bootsector.dat in cmdcons which loads the setupldr.bin from cmdcons.

As I took the orignal bootsect.dat, it didn't start the console but only returned to the menue.

So I have these files/folders in root:

--------------

cmdcons 11/24/06 0

minint 11/24/06 0

boot.ini 11/24/06 235

cmldr 8/03/04 262448

NTDETECT.COM 8/03/04 47564

ntldr 8/03/04 251184

6 File(s) 561,431 bytes

That`s it!

If you also copy the minint e.g. or another xp installation folder to root, you can logon to this without password, regardless the registry settings of the main xp-installation of the computer!

set shows that AllowAllPaths is true by default and You can set AllowRemovableMedia to true...

Best Regards,

Steph