Hi!
We deploy Windows XP using a custom unattended installation procedure.
Windows XP setup is run in Dosemu on a netbooted Linux.
Basically, our installer partitions the disk, formats the Windows
partition with FAT32 and then executes setup.exe in dosemu. After the
installation has finished, grub is installed on the first partition (WinXP
usually gets installed on the second partition).
This works quite well with our normal PCs, ie. ~90 Athlon/AMD64/P4 PCs
install flawlessly. However, our IBM Thinkpads (R32) just can't be
installed using that method. grub works, however, when trying to chainload
the Windows partition with

rootnoverify (hd0,1)
makeactive
chainloader +1
boot

it just doesn't boot. No error messages are shown. When trying to boot
directly (ie. without installing grub and letting Windows setup install
the MBR itself), it fails with "NTLDR not found", even though the MBR
seems to be correct. When Windows Setup is run directly from CD, it works
as it should.

Does anyone have any idea as to what could be the cause of this error?
I'm completely lost. I already eliminated one problem (the BIOS seems to
not return anything when grub probes for fd0), but I don't have any idea
at all on what's the cause of this.

Regards,
Jonas Jochum
archIT - Faculty of Architecture - University of Karlsruhe

Jonas Jochum schrieb:
> Hi!
> We deploy Windows XP using a custom unattended installation procedure.
> Windows XP setup is run in Dosemu on a netbooted Linux.
> Basically, our installer partitions the disk, formats the Windows
> partition with FAT32 and then executes setup.exe in dosemu. After the
> installation has finished, grub [...doesnotwork]

Don' t expect ANY support for grub in a Microsoft newsgroup ...

Mario Schmidt wrote:

> Jonas Jochum schrieb:
>> Hi!
>> We deploy Windows XP using a custom unattended installation procedure.
>> Windows XP setup is run in Dosemu on a netbooted Linux.
>> Basically, our installer partitions the disk, formats the Windows
>> partition with FAT32 and then executes setup.exe in dosemu. After the
>> installation has finished, grub [...doesnotwork]
>
> Don' t expect ANY support for grub in a Microsoft newsgroup ...

Actually, booting XP without grub (as I wrote further down) doesn't work
either. It then fails with "NTLDR not found".
Do you have a better place to ask that question? ;-)

Regards,
Jonas