Booting though winPe2.1

[vnykr]

hi

i am trying to boot through winPe2.1.. when my boot.wim size > 900MB

i am facing problem to start "Windows Boot Manager" after it loads boot.wim into RAM

Error Mesg is something like this

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windows failed to start. A recent hardware or software change might cause. to fix the problem

1. insert your windows instan disk and restart the computer

2. choose your language settings and click next

3. click repair your computer

status:0x00000017

Info: An unexpected error has occurred

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Is there any limitation for boot.wim that we use during booting time

If i reduce the size of boot.wim to around 250MB, it is able to start

size of boot.wim where i am facing the issue problem is > 900MB

I compressed the boot image .... it reduced upto 600MB .. but resulted the same.. no luck

available RAM in the machine i am booting is 2GB.. and by the way i am using bootable USB...

any clues..??

--Thanks & Regards

[IcemanND]

Please don't post the same question to multiple forums.

Move to Windows PE forum.

In regards to your problem the limitation to the size of the boot.wim is the amount of available memory in the machine you are booting. The entire Boot.wim is loaded into memory, so you would need at least 900mb of memory, and if that wim is compressed even more.

[vnykr]

As i stated i have enough RAM in the BOX ie., 2GB

[Tripredacus]

Try putting it on a CD and see if you get different results. Are you doing this on a live machine or a VM?

[vnykr]

I am doing this on a live machine.

And if i reduce size of boot.wim file (<400MB) by removing additional

files, it boots up properly..

[Tripredacus]

What is the size of the USB key and what file system did you format it as?

[vnykr]

size of USB is 4GB..

FAT32 ...

by the way.. it is loading wim image and later failing @ windows boot manager

probably problem in loading ntoskrnl ..

as i told you .. if i remove additional folders from wim image (making wim ~= 400MB)

it works properly..

[Tripredacus]

I am wondering why your Win PE is so large. Mine is under 200MB. Mine has some custom HTA stuff, a Burn program and only NIC and Intel RAID drivers installed. What else are you putting in yours to make it so big? Are you putting a WIM inside your PE WIM?

Also, let me add that with my small PE, it still won't run on anything smaller than 512MB RAM. You might be running into a memory situation there.

[Lasray]

Using bcdedit.exe -store there are 2 options that may help debug the bootup of the image.

The options to set are 'sos' and 'bootlog' (I cannot remember the exact syntax of the whole command as I write this) but its something like

bcdedit.exe -store <drive>\boot\BCD -set GUID sos Yes

bcdedit.exe -store <drive>\boot\BCD -set GUID bootlog Yes

(The image will have to be mounted on your technical machine first, vdk.exe is 1 tool that will do this and will give you <drive> value)

Once these options are set in the image and then booting the image *may* give an indication of where the error is or perhaps what is causing it. It should at least stop when the error occurs giving all the drivers loaded so far.

I hope this helps