Booting with boot.ini from USB Key

[Dave]

Hi All,
I'm having trouble getting my PC to boot to a particular partition via
a USB stick. Here's the scenario:

My harddisk has 2 partitions, each with it's own XP installation. What
I want to do is it use the presence of a USB stick to determine which
partition (and hence Windows installation) is used to boot. My scheme
was to create a bootable USB stick using the instructions here:

http://www.bay-wolf.com/usbmemstick.htm

This produces a win98-type loader to a dos shell. Then, I thought I
could create a boot.ini file that would direct the booting process to
boot the appropriate Windows OS from the appropriate partition.
Therefore, if the USB stick is not present at boot up, the system
would boot into partition1 and if it was, it would boot up into
partition2.

Unfortunately, I can't get this to work. Currently, when booting from
the USB stick, the system ignores the boot.ini file. Incidentally,
I've also copied ntdetect & ntlder onto the USB stick to see if that
helps, but no luck.

Has anybody got any clues?. Is this doable or am I trying to do
something impossible?. Any other suggestions are gratefully receieved.

Dave

 

[Mark L. Ferguson]

XP reads only the C: drive copy of boot.ini. Your ntldr on the usb drive is
sending it there. I would forget booting to the usb drive, and boot to a
default windows partition that you want without the usb. A script run at
startup would look for boot.ini on the usb drive, and if found, change the
read only attrib for the existing boot.ini, copy the usb file to C:, (which
boots the second partition that wants the usb), then runs 'shutdown /f /r /t
00' to restart.