Making my XPe Disk bootable

[Doug Wyatt]

So I have the "standard" development set up, I think, in that I have XP Pro
with XPe tools on my C: drive, and a freshly formatted NTFS disk as my D:
that I copy my built images on to. I can follow a process similar to that
in the Tutorial where I build my image, copy it to my D:, reboot my system
and use the boot.ini file on my C: drive to select my XPe disk, the D:
drive, as the boot disk.

But if instead of just rebooting, I configure the target image to think it
is the C: drive, power down, remove my XP Pro drive, and reboot, it's clear
that my second drive isn't bootable. It prints out "GRUB" and hangs - the
disk was a Linux disk with GRUB installed on it in a previous life, so it's
clear that in formating the disk, I didn't get a bootloader.

I've looked through all of the format tools (found that fdisk is no longer
available on XP) and googled the hell out my question and can't find the
answer. It seems like I'm trying to do a relatively simple thing, so I'm
suprised I can't find an answer.

How do I make a Windows XPe NTFS disk bootable so I can have it as the only
drive in my system and have it come up? The SDI tool seems, from the
documentation, to be vaguely related to what I want to do, but I can't tell
if it really is or if it's just used to run "virtual disk images".

Thanks,
Doug

 

[Slobodan Brcin]

First what do you want to do?

If you want to eradicate linux use diskpart it is very powerful and very
destructive so be cautious.
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?kbid=300415
diskpart clean all command will do the trick.

Create bootable disk:

make new NTFS partition set it active, and you should be ok (it is bootable
always)
You will need ntldr. boot.ini but this will be created by TD.

If you want to use development machine for testing purposes or if you have
network read my reply post from yesterday XP/XPE dual boot.


Best regards,
Slobodan

 

[Anil Ingle [MS]]

After formatting your drive D as NTFS did you try and "mark the partition as
active?". To do this, Boot into XP-PRO, format your drive to be NTFS, then
start DISKMGMT.MSC, right click on your disk and you should see the option
to "mark partition as active". This should get the boot code onto your
disk.
HTH
-ANIL [MS] This posting is provided AS IS. It makes no warranties and
confers no rights.