"Error loading operating system"

[Roger Levy]

I am using small, vintage HDs on a standard Dell PC as my target. One
reason for this is that I am trying to strictly follow a tutorial and it's
impractical to use "sdimgr /readdisk" to capture a "golden image" with newer
drives since that command reads the entire physical drive. I have used both
a 260 and 340MB drive and both appear fine since they can run Win95 and do a
good scandisk. However whenever I attempt FBA immediately after
transferring my target files to these drives, I immediately get the message
"Error loading operating system" and no further progress. Inspection shows
that all the expected files, e.g. boot.ini, ntldr, etc. are in the right
places. The same target files go through FBA and sealing fine when I
tranfer them to a 6GB drive on the same target machine. During a NG search,
the only XP reference I found for this error message was related to large
disks and old BIOSs. I updated my computer's BIOS to the latest version
(dated 2003) but there has been no change.

Is there any known issue with booting XPe from small, old drives? Does
somebody have an explanation of "Error loading operating system?"

Roger Levy

 

[Andy Allred [MS]]

Roger, that is a bios error, not an XPe issue. I'm guessing here, but did
you prepare your master boot record for NT operating systems or is it still
trying to load the 9x loader files? Simply dropping another platform's
operating system (Mac, NT OS, Linux) onto the drive isn't going to work.

Bootprep.exe, which is supplied with the xpe tools, will prepare the MBR
for you. Read about it here:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/xpehelp/html/xeconbootprepexe.asp

You say you're going through a tutorial on how to build and deploy the
runtime, please tell me which tutorial this is so we can ensure the steps of
mentioning the MBR are listed - assuming it's an MS tutorial.

Andy

 

[Roger Levy]

Andy (warning: necessarily long),
Based on progress I made since posting my questions, I think it is an XPe
issue. I am following the MSDN article "Building and Deploying XP Embedded
Images" by David Reed, et. al. I didn't find mention of bootprep in the article
or in any other docs I've read thus far however I did see some mention of it in
the NG. In fact, the article states clearly that when writing to disk "SDI
Manager performs a sector based copy so tools such as fdisk and format are not
required."

I did however previously encounter a problem and a very unhelpful error message
when I used the article's procedures on a 6GB disk that previously hosted
Linux. Eventually I figured out that I should rewrite the MBR by using the
fixmbr recovery disk function. Afterwards, I was careful to use fixmbr on all
target drives nonetheless I got different results with smaller drives. I was
able to follow the article section "Deploying the Pre-FBA Image" with the 6GB
drive however the next section (Capturing the "Golden" Image) was problematic
because it required a network share with at least 6GB of free space which I
didn't have. So I went to smaller disks as described in my earlier post. These
attempts failed as I described.

Although my TD config specified NTFS, I found that sdimgr in the WinPE
environment was creating what appeared to be FAT16 partitions on the small
drives. Perhaps this is part of the problem?? Perhaps when sdimgr etc. sees
drives smaller than 500 Mbytes it does what other Windows disk tools do, that is
default to FAT16?? Executing bootprep prior to using sdimgr did not change
things. Executing it afterward wiped out all the files as its banner promised.
So I tried something different.

I changed my TD config to use FAT. Then I used fdisk and format on a Win98
startup disk to create a small FAT32 partition. Those operations required the
/FPRMT option switch for fdisk which I luckily found via a Google/Groups search
- the switch is apparently undocumented. Then in the WinPE environment I used
xcopy to copy the target files to the local disk from a network share. The
resulting system did not boot until I executed bootprep. Warnings from bootprep
threatened to destroy the directory structure and erase the files however that
didn't happen although it did when the partition was FAT16! This system booted,
went through FBA, and finally produced the "sealed" message. Since I used a
tiny 128MB HD, I was easily able to complete the "Capturing the Golden Image"
section. Maybe the success of this procedure depends on benign bugs in the
tools, e.g. the files surviving bootprep. However it certainly seems to me that
the tools have anomalies related to small drives. Maybe that's understandable
due to possible lack of testing with 10-12 year old drives.

However what I don't feel is understandable is the fact that the procedures in
the article appear to be untried by the authors. For example, in the
"deploying" section they say to put read-only permissions on a share. In the
next section they describe write operations to the same share. Also, they fail
to warn that the write will fail unless the *total* size of the target drive is
smaller than the *available* space on the development share. Since the design
of the XPe tools makes it clearly advantageous for target and development
machines to be as identical as possible, this requirement is very problematic.
Even so, I would be more understanding if the resultant error message had been
something that was clear.

Using my new procedure, I have almost worked my way through this tutorial and
one other. It's taken me 3-4 weeks - most of that has been wild experimenting
in trying to correct problems for which there was a very inadequate error
message or for which I could not find answers in the documentation.

Roger Levy