BCDW sometimes not booting

[eggbert]

I use a multiboot CD based around BCDW but some computers won't boot it, I presume they don't like no-emulation boot sectors. Is there any way around this?

I notice that UBCD does boot on these machines, is it possbile to load BCDW from the UBCD loader but sort of invisibly?

I noticed that you can chainload BCDW from isolinux but the slight problem here is that I already have an isolinux folder on the CD which I use to run gparted from BCDW and it might get a bit messy, also I don't know if isolinux will be better at booting than BCDW.

Alternatively, if there is no way around this, is there some kind of alternative to BCDW which will boot the following:

windows XP home

all the disk utilities such as IBM DFT (mostly iso's)

gparted

partition magic

ghost 2003

[cdob]

BCDW, UBCD and isolinux use no-emulation boot mode.

Does BCDW fail at very old or new machines (this year) ?

There are different BIOS and different BIOS boot cd implementations.

A bootloader has to include work arrounds for a strange BIOS.

BCDW isn't developed since 2004. BCDW may fail at new hardware nowadays.

UBCD v3 used CD shell bootloader. BCDW can be chainloaded.

UBCD v4 uses ISOlinux bootloader.

I don't know a bootloader supporting all your needs.

Isolinux is developed still.

Do you use UBCD v4 ? Does this boot at all your machines?

[eggbert]

Its not particularly old or new machines - the one computer it never boots up on is actually my own which is an ASUS socket 939 board so I always have to use virtual PC.

I think my version of UBCD is 3. How do you chainload BCDW from CDShell?

[Siginet]

I have actually seen this issue as well. It is actually very rare. I saw it on an HP machine recently. The machine was about 3 years old. I have no idea why it wouldn't work. It would get to the Starting Disk... then it would just stop. I tried DVDs and CDs. All of them worked unless they were using bcdw.

Very Weird.

I have also seen issues with chain linking too many bcdw loader files.

[jaclaz]

You can try also using grub4dos.

The "standard" way of using it to boot CD's is by using grldr as no-emulation bootsector, which, if the problem you are experiencing is connected to a "no-emulation" incompatibility of some kind, won't solve the problem, but you can use a FAT12 floppy with grub4dos as El-torito emulation image, and from it chainload whatever you want on the "rest" of CD.

jaclaz

[eggbert]

Cheers, I've actually sorted it out by booting isolinux first, it was actually surprisingly easy although now its tempting to base the cd around isolinux seeing as how well it works for UBCD4, BCDW is a bit outdated these days.