Moving A Pe Image To Boot Of Cd

[dodjer42]

Hey all,

(Sorry topic title was poorly written)

I currently have a working WinPE image on CD, but I need to run it from a secondary partition on a systems that does not have a CD Rom drive. I have tried various things from simply copying the CD contents, to doing an image from CD and restoring it to the partition. I mark the partition active, but when I try to boot it, I get the "missing operating system" error message.

I have read the form posting on here about creating disk based PE image, and I tried some of that (didn't solve issue), but I am not trying to create an image, simply to move it from CD to disk and make it bootable.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated!

Thx

[Siginet]

Isn't their a PEHD install on the bart disk? I beleive there is a way to install bart to the hard disk so that you are given the option to boot into your os or the bart os.

You would need to have the pehdinst plugin and you would have to burn an ISO onto the computer in some way. Mount the iso in a program like "Daemon Tools" and install it to the hard drive.

Not sure if WinPE has the same thing.

[dodjer42]

I got this working. The process is amazingly simple.

Copy CD:\i386 directory to partition:\minint

Copy CD:\i386\setupldr.bin partition:\ntldr

Copy CD:\i386\ntdetect.com partition:\ntdetect.com

I then use a boot loader to choose between the system partition and the PE partition. You could just as easily modify boot.ini to give a boot option to the PE partition if you prefer not to use a boot loader.

Thanks for your help!

[Takeshi]

That's interesting.

I've followed previous threads here (esp. topic 14316) and have succeeded in multi-boot:

Windows XP SP2

Windows PE

Recovery Console

all on the 1st active parimary partition.

Then I tried dodjer42's method but without using a boot manager or hiding partitions just as an experiment.

If I put minint on an adjacent primary partition (with an existing 2nd XP) it doesn't work. It doesn't look like a simple editing of boot.ini's ARC path would do.

boot.ini

[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="XP SP2" /noexecute=optin /fastdetect
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINDOWS="Windows XP" /noexecute=optin /fastdetect
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\MININT="PE" 

It gives the error:

MININT\SYSTEM32\CONFIG\SYSTEM is missing

which is the typical error when the registry is corrupt in Windows.

I thought of the Recovery Console but it only installs on the first partition and BOOTSECT.DAT seems to load minint from the first partition only.

[Metzen]

That's interesting.

I've followed previous threads here (esp. topic 14316) and have succeeded in multi-boot:

Windows XP SP2

Windows PE

Recovery Console

all on the 1st active parimary partition.

Then I tried dodjer42's method but without using a boot manager or hiding partitions  just as an experiment.

If I put minint on an adjacent primary partition (with an existing 2nd XP) it doesn't work. It doesn't look like a simple editing of boot.ini's ARC path would do.

boot.ini

[boot loader]
timeout=30
default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="XP SP2" /noexecute=optin /fastdetect
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINDOWS="Windows XP" /noexecute=optin /fastdetect
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\MININT="PE" 

It gives the error:

MININT\SYSTEM32\CONFIG\SYSTEM is missing

which is the typical error when the registry is corrupt in Windows.

I thought of the Recovery Console but it only installs on the first partition and BOOTSECT.DAT seems to load minint from the first partition only.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

That's because the "SYSTEM" registry in WinPE is setupreg.hiv in the \winpe\system32 folder.