El Torito boot over USB-CD

[Gert Leunen]

Hi, I'm using a Pentium M SBC board (Intel 915GM chipset), for which I'm
trying to make an El Torito bootable CD/DVD to start XPe.

- When I directly connect the CD/DVD drive using the IDE connection, my El
Torito DVD boots fine.
- When I connect the same CD/DVD drive to an IDE-to-USB 2.0 converter and
then connect to the mainboard using USB 2.0, that same El Torito DVD no
longer wants to boot.
- If I insert another bootable CD (like Windows PE), still connected through
USB 2.0, that CD does boot.

So, it looks like the IDE-to-USB conversion and the CD/DVD drive are
compliant to allow booting from that CD/DVD drive over USB 2.0, but there
probably is an El Torito implementation issue?

Today I also tried to use the "USB 2.0 Boot", "USB Boot Mass Storage Device"
and "USB NT Hardware Detect" components from the Feature Pack 2007 CTP, but
to no avail.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Gert Leunen
Software Engineer
R&D International NV

 

[Oren Winter [MS]]

Gert,
Can you please describe in more details what is not working when trying to
use the CTP's USB Boot components? Are you getting a 0x7B bugcheck?
Thanks,
Oren

 

[Gert Leunen]

No, it doesn't even get to the "text mode progress bar" at the bottom. When
I disable booting from the harddrive (so only USB-CDROM is in the BIOS boot
sequence), it just says "DISK BOOT FAILURE, INSERT SYSTEM DISK AND PRESS
ENTER.".

Connecting the same drive, with the same disc inserted, directly to the IDE
port (with CDROM in the BIOS boot sequence) boots just fine.

Thanks for looking at this

Gert

 

[Oren Winter [MS]]

Gert,
Unfortunately we haven't tested this scenario yet as our USB Boot feature's
high priority is intended for mainly USB flash drives and not necessarily
optical drives. We are going to look into it and have at least the right
documentation / guidance in place for our FP release.
If anyone else on the newsgroup had ran into similar issues - please let us
know. I'd be interested to hear if this is a "one off" or we actually have a
generic problem here.
My apologies,
Oren