Running from a USB "thumb" drive

[Gereon]

My boss wants me to try and get XPe to run from a USB thumb drive to "prove
a concept" for a system upgrade scheme. Has anyone done this successfully?
If so, is it straightforward?

 

[KM]

Gereon,

MS XP Usb drivers were not meant to be used for boot, so there is no straightforward way to do the XPe boot off any Usb storage
device. However, it may work on some.
Search NG archive for Slobodan's usb reg fixes to push usbstor and other drivers to load at boot phase.

Also, you may want to evaluate uDoc solution from MSystem. This will give you a way to boot XPe as you wanted much easier.

KM

 

[Slobodan Brcin \(eMVP\)]

Hi Gereon,

This is not supported by MS and it is not a straight forward process by default.
You can make SDI image and do RAM boot from USB disk or any disk for that matter.

Or you can order from M-Systems proprietary solution for their USB uDOC disks.

http://www.m-systems.com/files/documentation/doc/uDiskOnChip_PB_0704.pdf

Regards,
Slobodan

 

[Gereon]

So with the SDI toolkit, if we could get the system to boot from the thumb
drive somehow (with DOS or something??), and we had an SDI image file with
an XP Embedded build on it, we could load the image into RAM and run the XP
Embedded image?

 

[Slobodan Brcin \(eMVP\)]

So with the SDI toolkit, if we could get the system to boot from the thumb

drive somehow (with DOS or something??), and we had an SDI image file with
an XP Embedded build on it, we could load the image into RAM and run the XP
Embedded image?

Yes if you can manage to load SDI to memory then it is no longer USB problem bur rather RAM boot problem and everything that follow
with it. Look at remote boot functionality since this is the similar (same thing). Also use Google groups to search through this NG
archives we already discussed this allot in the past.

Regards,
Slobodan

 

[Desi]

Gereon,

Here is an extended thread about making bootable USB keys.

http://www.msfn.org/board/index.php?s=957440dc39bfb1efb9d7a84270d42610&showtopic=26612&st=0

The thing to note is that if your device is not USB 2.0, you will not
have any luck, since USB 1.1 resets the bus (And thus the connections
to your boot device) each time it detects a new device on the bus. This
causes boot errors that cannot be recovered from.

I also noticed that there is one person saying that booting from USB
key will be one of the supported features in Windows Server 2003 SP1,
which is in Release Candidate 1 phase right now.
Good luck, and keep us posted.

Desi Richards

 

[Gereon]

OK, I think I found enough info to give this a shot.

So the root of the problem (why we can't boot directly from the USB drive)
is that XP "shoots itself in the foot" when it initializes the USB on
startup?

 

[Slobodan Brcin \(eMVP\)]

Hi Gereon,

There is no root of the problem :-(
There are myriads of "small" things that can go wrong. Also there are few settings that you must make for XPe to be actually able at
all to support USB on boot time.
On some hardware under certain conditions it is even possible to boot XPe from USB without additional third-party drivers. You can
search for info in this NG posted by me how to do some part of this.

Regards,
Slobodan

 

[Gereon]

I was able to get an image in an SDI file on my thumbdrive to load to a RAM
drive and run. Good 'nuff! Thanks everybody!