Need help with making bootable CD with XPe (stuck at welcome screen)

[bobhopper13]

I'm having some tremendous difficulties in getting a bootable CD of XPe
to work (using XPe SP2 eval), and I haven't been able to find much
online that pertains to my particular issues. Can anybody help me?

I'm using VMware Workstation 4.5.0 build 7174 as my target system for
now. Eventually, I intend to use the CD on Intel server platforms. I
use the SDI Loader tool to create physical disks to which I deploy my
images and then attach to a virtual machine in VMware.

Starting small, I first tried just making a build that would boot from
a hard disk. I built a configuration using the WinLogon Macro
component, the Explorer shell component and a component I created for
the VMware SCSI drivers. After creating the build, I prepared a new
SDI disk (700 MB) and used DISKPART to create a primary FAT32
partition (690 MB to leave room for EWF later on) and make it active.
I copied the build files to this drive (temporarily giving the drive
a letter to do so). In VMware, I created a new virtual machine,
selecting "Other" as the guest OS. I set up the hard disk as SCSI 0:0
and selected the option to use a physical disk, pointing it to the one
provided by SDI Loader. I booted the virtual machine and after the FBA
was complete, I was greeted with the shell.

Next, I progressed to creating a bootable CD. I used the procedure
outlined on MSDN (titled "How to create a Bootable CD-ROM" last updated
21 Sep 2004). Using the previous configuration as a base, I added the
El Torito CD Support macro component and followed the instructions:

1. Cleared "Start EWF Enabled" in the Enhanced Write Filter component.
Verified that the disk number was 0 and the partition number was 1.
2. Did dependency check, disabled NTLDR (since I'm using EWF NTLDR).
3. Built the image, formatted the SDI disk (no changes made to the
partitions from the previous setup) and transferred the image to it.
4. Used hd2iso to create pre.iso. Set the disk signature to 0X7FFFFFFF
(the value in the El Torito component in my image), selected 80-min
cd as target media, volume ID of "ELTO", and selected to boot
partition 1.
5. Using the same virtual machine, assign the CD drive to point to
pre.iso. Checked the BIOS to make sure that it set to boot from the
hard disk first, then booted the machine. The machine starts to
boot, the FBA starts and after another reboot (or two? I forget)
I'm at the shell. Checking the status of EWF and the FBA log
reveals that my results are the same as those given in the MS
article in all significant respects.
6. Run etprep /all. The system immediately reboots, so I don't get a
chance to see any output (I even tried etprep /all > c:\etprep.txt
but all I got after the reboot was an empty file). I shut down the
virtual machine before it finishes its POST on the reboot (the
first time that I did this I was too slow and the machine rebooted
- other posts I've seen say that the machine shouldn't be able to
reboot from the HD but mine did - I don't know if that indicates a
problem).
7. Once the virtual machine is shut down I again use hd2iso to make a
new iso (post.iso). I use the same settings as before.

I tried using this cd with a number of virtual machine configurations.
I initially tried one that had no hard disk, just the cd-rom. Other
attempts include:

- Same VM used to boot pre-FBA image, but with BIOS set to boot from CD
- HD (SCSI 0:0), CD (IDE 0:0)
- HD (SCSI 0:0), CD (IDE 1:0)
- HD (IDE 0:0), CD (IDE 0:1)

In every case, I get the same behavior. Everything goes normally until
I
get a light blue screen with darker blue borders at the top and bottom,
with the XP logo in the centre of the screen (I think this normally
appears just before the welcome screen). The machine then just sits
there. The status light for the CD drive blinks on about once every
second. In one case, I actually got a BSOD after a time. The message
was:

BAD_POOL_CALLER
*** STOP: 0x000000C2 (0x00000007,0x00000CD4,0x0001020A,0xE11DC880)

Can anybody point me in the right direction. I've seen a few scattered
posts from people with the same problem but with no replies.

My ultimate goal here is to create a bootable CD that will run XPe from
a RAM disk (so that I can swap the CD with another once it's up), so if
there is a different path I can take that perhaps avoids this issue
entirely, I'm open to that as well.

-BobH

 

[Slobodan Brcin \(eMVP\)]

My ultimate goal here is to create a bootable CD that will run XPe from

a RAM disk (so that I can swap the CD with another once it's up), so if
there is a different path I can take that perhaps avoids this issue
entirely, I'm open to that as well.

So long post and you want only this

Follow the help guidelines for making XPe boot from RAM disk. (from network
for instance.)

When you got working SDI image that you can boot from HDD configuring
boot.ini and CD to load it is accomplished in mater of minutes.

You will find everything that you need here:
http://groups-beta.google.com/group...oft.public.windowsxp.embedded&q=rdpath&qt_g=1

In case that you have problems just continue this thread (so that we know
that you are still on virtual machine).

Regards,
Slobodan

 

[bobhopper13]

I've followed your advice and am going straight to a boot-from-RAM
approach. Unfortunately I'm still having problems.

I created an base image including RAM drive support. I booted this in a
virtual machine and let the FBA process run, then shut down the
machine. I then created another SDI disk and put boot.ini,
ntdetect.com, ntldr, and my other SDI (runimg.sdi) on it. I altered the
boot.ini to read:

[boot loader]
timeout=1
default=ramdisk(0)\WINDOWS
[operating systems]
ramdisk(0)\WINDOWS="XPe from RAM" /fastdetect
/rdpath=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\runimg.sdi
/rdimageoffset=4096

(that last line may have wrapped, but it's all on one line)

I then ran hd2iso to make an ISO. I created a new virtual machine with
no hard disk and point the CD to this ISO image. When it boots, I see
the "Loading RAMDISK image" message and the progress bar completes.
Then I get the following:

Windows could not start because the following file is missing or
corrupt:
<Windows root>\system32\ntoskrnl.exe
Please re-install a copy of the above file.

Any ideas where I went wrong?

 

[Slobodan Brcin \(eMVP\)]

Bob,

You have too complex test scenario.
Please try this on real computer and not on VmWare virtual machine.

When you do RAM boot then boot medium is not important. So you should test
it directly from HDD to reduce number of steps that you do and to ease
yourself prodcedure and time required for tests.

I have no clue why you have this error if files are in RAM disk.

Regards,
Slobodan

 

[bobhopper13]

I've found my problem.

My runimg.sdi did not have a PART blob, just a DISK blob, which
explains why ntoskrnl.exe couldn't be found - the ARC path in
runimg.sdi included "part(1)", which didn't exist. After I had a
post-FBA image that ran from HD, I created another "wrapper" SDI and
used "sdimgr wrapimg.sdi /readpart:d:" (with my runimg.sdi mounted at
D. I verified the offset of the PART blob and edited the boot.ini of
my final, bootable SDI image to load wrapimg.sdi. It then worked
beautifully.

 

[bobhopper13]

I've found my problem.

My runimg.sdi did not have a PART blob, just a DISK blob, which
explains why ntoskrnl.exe couldn't be found - the ARC path in
runimg.sdi included "part(1)", which didn't exist. After I had a
post-FBA image that ran from HD, I created another "wrapper" SDI and
used "sdimgr wrapimg.sdi /readpart:d:" (with my runimg.sdi mounted at
D. I verified the offset of the PART blob and edited the boot.ini of
my final, bootable SDI image to load wrapimg.sdi. It then worked
beautifully.

Sorry - "part(1)" should read "partition(1)"