Soultech

Thanks very much Jaclaz, that looks like exactly what I needed. I'll give it a go.

Hi Alan, thanks for the reply, I also thought of this but the program that would be running from the CD will just be something like WinPE with a startup script to run my program. Things like this need their own partition dedicated to it (AFAIK) which would require the drive to be partitioned, the drive cannot be partitioned while the main partition is active unless you use something like Partition magic to resize the partition but this solution has to only include freeware (for commercial use) or MS stuff unfortunately. As far as I know you can't boot 2 OS's from the same partition but then you'd still have the same problem anyway. thanks anyway.

Hi All, I'm wondering if there is some way to add a script into WinPE that inspects the HDD and if it sees a flag file then it will boot the hard drive instead of booting the rest of WinPE? I mean from within WinPE not a 'Press A Key' to boot option. Thanks in advance.

Hey, This may be a wierd question but I am making a decommisioning CD for PCs which needs to boot into Windows XP and then boot onto a CD, after a reboot, without changing the BIOS or require any user input so that the hard disk can be repartitioned or formatted (i.e. so the HDD is no longer active). I've had a look into WinGRUB but I don't know how to select the CD as a bootable drive within it. I also have looked into changing the boot.ini but it seems you can only boot from fixed drives or USB using this method. I also thought about having a bootable CD (press any key) and then corrupting the HDD enough from within Windows to make it think there is no active partition by deleting the boot files in C: but this only makes Windows complain their not there and does not boot from the CD (doesn't matter about the HDD as it's going to be formatted anyway) and then it would auto boot from the CD after this. so again, I need a method that will work whether the CD is booting before OR after the HDD (I'll not know) and also the people that will be doing the decommisioning will not be able to plug in a keyboard either. So any suggestions or advice anyone can give would be gratefully appreciated.