Booting XPe from bigger SATA Hard Disk

[Boby George]

I ran into some issue where I cannot boot XPe from a 160GB or 250GB hard
disk. I tried booting using entirely 2 different reference platforms. I
did modify the default timeout to 30 seconds but still the boot menu
doesn't show up.

Both disk were partitioned and formatted using an XPe running from USB
stick on the board.

Any suggestions? Anybody has seen this issue.


Working Configuration:
Disk Vendor: Western Digital
Total Disk Size: 120GB
Primary Partition of size ~4GB
Remaining Space: Unpartitioned

Non-Working Configuration:
Disk Vendor: Seagate
Total Disk Size: 250GB
Primary Partition of Size ~4GB
Remaining Space: Unpartitioned

 

[KM]

Boby,

Try two things:
- Mark the system partition as active
- Try fixing MBR (you can use MbrFx tool from http://www.sysint.no/Nedlasting/MbrFix.htm)

 

[Boby George]

Yes. That was it. MBrfix utility did the job. Does this mean something
in XPe boot procedure from Microsoft is not complete?

Thanks,

Boby

 

[KM]

Boby,

XPe boot procedure from Microsoft? Are you referring to something particular?
Could you post a link to what you have followed?

 

[Boby George]

KM,

I didn't mean any specific links. I just meant the usual procedure about
using diskpart and using the "active" command to making it active. I was
expecting the procedure using diskpart to work as if I was using an XP
Professional installer. I guess XP Professional does more than just
partitioning and making it active.

Thanks,

Boby

 

[KM]

It is hard to answer this one. Too many variables there while you prepare the media to boot - from BIOS implementation to disk
geometry. Also, it very much depends on how you perform every single step during the storage preparation - you have to do that on
the target device, should ideally use DOS/fdisk first (this will make sure to use BIOS to create partition table and etc.).

Quite frankly, I also believe XPe documentation doesn't describe this topic in the details it should have to.
In some places in the documentation they assume you've got XP Pro running on the device. Which means you've already properly
partition and formatted the local storage to boot from using XP Pro Setup.
My personal opinion on this is that Microsoft should do:
- Create one tool (better Win32 app that we can launch from WinPE, XP Pro or any other flavor of XP and nowadays Vista) that
will properly partition local storage on target device. After all, XP Pro Setup does that *much* better and more reliable then any
tools from XPE toolkit.
- Provide more detail troubleshooting section in the documentation that will cover as many failed case as possible - from broken
MBR to boot sector, from changing timeout of boot.ini to debug parameters for KD.
- There should be documentation section (part of XPe docs!!) that explain how BIOS loads MBR, the MBR itself, boot sector, boot
sequence of XP, loader (how it gets loaded by bootsector) and etc. Ideally they include info about all the fields of MS version of
MBR and boot sectors. After all, most of this info is there in MS KB (but hard to search) and on the Web.
- Provide a set of tools (my best wish is to have one complex command line tool with a bunch of switches) that will do fixing
for all the parts that may get broken - from MBR to bootsectors (all types!) and partition setup (I secretly don't get why we
should be using 3rd party tools like MbrFix, for instance)

 

[Boby George]

KM,

I would like to avoid using as less third party tools as possible in my
XPe distribution package, due to future licensing issue and such. It
will be a nice feature for Microsoft to come up with such a
partitioning/formatting tool as the one you have mentioned with few good
switches. May be we can bring this up in the next public chat for XPe
FP2008.

As of now I just added MBRFix to my XPe Recovery CD since they allow you
to use the utility as long as I keep the MBRfix.htm in the same
directory. So things seems to work well.

Thanks for the info,

Boby