J
Josh B.
Hi all,
For the past few weeks, I've been fooling with Windows PE. Today I made
WinPE 2005 using Windows 2003 Sever SP1 as the source. Prior to this, I
was using XP SP2 as the source but I was having issues booting from the
hard disk using the XP source (was getting 0x0000007b stop errors) .
Oddly enough, I have no problems booting that XP source from my usb
flash drive or CD. But that isn't really my concern right now so more
about the issue at hand. I created an .iso from my Server 2k3, I copied
it to my XP machine into the root of C: I then created a winnt.sif in
the root of C: to point to the WinPE .iso image. Per the Microsoft
documentation, I copied over the ntdetect.com and setupldr (renamed
ntldr) again into the root of C: And I rebooted the machine. All is
well to this point. It boots to WinPE just fine.
My issue now is I would like to be able to boot to XP or PE on the same
drive. See, I have PE setup to connect to our network server so I can
perform ghost image loading and other various diagnostics. I created a
menu in vbscript so that I can simply enter a number corresponding to
the function I like to perform (I didn't want to bother with adding a
shell just for this.) So, if we need to reghost the machine, rather
than having a boot disk, simply boot the PC and select Win PE from the
menu. I use the .iso so that I can load PE into the ramdisk. Then this
makes the C: drive available to do whatever I want, format, ghost, etc.
BUT, I don't know how, or if it is even possible, to do this.
Essentially, I need to do a ramdisk boot from .iso via the boot.ini
file. Now I know that you can load PE (by installing the recovery
console first) using boot.ini if the PE source is available on the C:
drive -- I'm referring to the method in the Microsoft doc, but the
problem is that it is not being loaded into the ramdrive at that point.
If I tried to do a ghost with PE up that way, it'd probably crash. I
thought there would be away to interface boot.ini with the winnt.sif or
the ntldr somehow so that a ramdrive iso boot can be selected and
initiated via the boot.ini menu.
Any thoughts on this? Ideally, I would like to just add this to my XP
ghost images and hopefully eliminate the need for CD/Flash drive boot
disks for 85% of our reghosts. We do not use RIS and do not have PXE so
I'd really like to get this going. Thanks in advance.
For the past few weeks, I've been fooling with Windows PE. Today I made
WinPE 2005 using Windows 2003 Sever SP1 as the source. Prior to this, I
was using XP SP2 as the source but I was having issues booting from the
hard disk using the XP source (was getting 0x0000007b stop errors) .
Oddly enough, I have no problems booting that XP source from my usb
flash drive or CD. But that isn't really my concern right now so more
about the issue at hand. I created an .iso from my Server 2k3, I copied
it to my XP machine into the root of C: I then created a winnt.sif in
the root of C: to point to the WinPE .iso image. Per the Microsoft
documentation, I copied over the ntdetect.com and setupldr (renamed
ntldr) again into the root of C: And I rebooted the machine. All is
well to this point. It boots to WinPE just fine.
My issue now is I would like to be able to boot to XP or PE on the same
drive. See, I have PE setup to connect to our network server so I can
perform ghost image loading and other various diagnostics. I created a
menu in vbscript so that I can simply enter a number corresponding to
the function I like to perform (I didn't want to bother with adding a
shell just for this.) So, if we need to reghost the machine, rather
than having a boot disk, simply boot the PC and select Win PE from the
menu. I use the .iso so that I can load PE into the ramdisk. Then this
makes the C: drive available to do whatever I want, format, ghost, etc.
BUT, I don't know how, or if it is even possible, to do this.
Essentially, I need to do a ramdisk boot from .iso via the boot.ini
file. Now I know that you can load PE (by installing the recovery
console first) using boot.ini if the PE source is available on the C:
drive -- I'm referring to the method in the Microsoft doc, but the
problem is that it is not being loaded into the ramdrive at that point.
If I tried to do a ghost with PE up that way, it'd probably crash. I
thought there would be away to interface boot.ini with the winnt.sif or
the ntldr somehow so that a ramdrive iso boot can be selected and
initiated via the boot.ini menu.
Any thoughts on this? Ideally, I would like to just add this to my XP
ghost images and hopefully eliminate the need for CD/Flash drive boot
disks for 85% of our reghosts. We do not use RIS and do not have PXE so
I'd really like to get this going. Thanks in advance.
