Dual Boot Windows PE and Windows XP using iso/ramdrive

[passmaster16]

Hi all,

For the past few weeks, I've been fooling with PE. Today I made WinPE 2005 using Windows 2003 Sever SP1 as the source. Prior to this, I was using XP SP2 as the source but I was having issues booting from the hard disk using the XP source (was getting 0x0000007b stop errors) . Oddly enough, I have no problems booting that XP source from my usb flash drive or CD. But that isn't really my concern right now so more about the issue at hand. I created an .iso from my Server 2k3, I copied it to my XP machine into the root of C: I then created a winnt.sif in the root of C: to point to the WinPE .iso image. Per the Microsoft documentation, I copied over the ntdetect.com and setupldr (renamed ntldr) again into the root of C: And I rebooted the machine. All is well to this point. It boots to WinPE just fine.

My issue now is I would like to be able to boot to XP or PE on the same drive. See, I have PE setup to connect to our network server so I can perform ghost image loading and other various diagnostics. I created a menu in vbscript so that I can simply enter a number corresponding to the function I like to perform (I didn't want to bother with adding a shell just for this.) So, if we need to reghost the machine, rather than having a boot disk, simply boot the PC and select Win PE from the menu. I use the .iso so that I can load PE into the ramdisk. Then this makes the C: drive available to do whatever I want, format, ghost, etc. BUT, I don't know how, or if it is even possible, to do this. Essentially, I need to do a ramdisk boot from .iso via the boot.ini file. Now I know that you can load PE (by installing the recovery console first) using boot.ini if the PE source is available on the C: drive -- I'm referring to the method in the Microsoft doc, but the problem is that it is not being loaded into the ramdrive at that point. If I tried to do a ghost with PE up that way, it'd probably crash. I thought there would be away to interface boot.ini with the winnt.sif or the ntldr somehow so that a ramdrive iso boot can be selected and initiated via the boot.ini menu.

Any thoughts on this? Ideally, I would like to just add this to my XP ghost images and hopefully eliminate the need for CD/Flash drive boot disks for 85% of our reghosts. We do not use RIS and do not have PXE so I'd really like to get this going. Thanks in advance.

[Bilou_Gateux]

Answer

[passmaster16]

Answer

Hi, I downloaded the latest PEBuilder source from Bart. I followed mats instructions but I get the following error when I try to boot Windows PE

NTLDR is missing
Press Ctrl+Alt+Del to restart

Any ideas? WinXP boots fine and PE boots fine if I just use its bootsector files. Did I do something wrong with mkbt or nt2peldr? Thanks.

[passmaster16]

Nevermind...I got it working. I forgot to copy the setupldr.bin into the root of C: as peldr Once I did this it worked like a charm.

Thanks Bilou_Gateux and Mats for this solution...using Bart's bootloader mod is very slick indeed.