Ramdisk boot with frozen progress bar

[Moose.Karpius]

Hi all-

I am a newbie and am tasked with trying to get XPE to boot and run on
a diskless system. Nearly made it with an El Torito bootable CD until
I learned that the USB stack comes too late in the boot cycle. Now am
trying to load a 400 MB post-FBA SDI image (containing only the PART
blob and with the correct offset of 4096 in the boot.ini) and I get a
progress bar representing the loading of the image to RAM that freezes
once it is 'complete'. There are no errors, there is only this black
screen with a white bar across the bottom. Currently I am trying this
with the image on the C: drive and have tried with once with the image
on a CD connected via USB. The HD image loads in about 2minutes the
USB image loads in about 25 minutes but both give the same result - a
frozen complete progress bar.

I apologize if this has been addressed before! Can anyone suggest what
I might be doing wrong?

Thanks,
Pedro

 

[Adora Belle Dearheart]

Hi all-

I am a newbie and am tasked with trying to get XPE to boot and run on
a diskless system. Nearly made it with an El Torito bootable CD until
I learned that the USB stack comes too late in the boot cycle. Now am
trying to load a 400 MB post-FBA SDI image (containing only the PART
blob and with the correct offset of 4096 in the boot.ini) and I get a
progress bar representing the loading of the image to RAM that freezes
once it is 'complete'. There are no errors, there is only this black
screen with a white bar across the bottom. Currently I am trying this
with the image on the C: drive and have tried with once with the image
on a CD connected via USB. The HD image loads in about 2minutes the
USB image loads in about 25 minutes but both give the same result - a
frozen complete progress bar.

I apologize if this has been addressed before! Can anyone suggest what
I might be doing wrong?

Thanks,
Pedro

I'd say either the thing is too big - how much RAM do you have on that
box? - or that the image isn't suitable for booting the hardware. I've
been messing about with PXE myself the last couple of weeks, and I
finally have an image - thanks partially to Dietmar - which will boot
any of the units we have here... well, the ones that *will* PXE boot
anyway. My original image booted the Intel units fine, but froze in the
way you described on Via hardware.

 

[Moose.Karpius]

Well I believe that I have plenty of RAM but will verify this. The FBA
runs with no issues, so I will look into the SDI image. When loading
RAM from local HD or USB CD I only need the PART blob correct?


Thanks,
Pedro

 

[Moose.Karpius]

You were right! The image was too big! I have 515 MB of RAM and I
guess a 400 MB image does not leave enough margin. I made the image
size 200 MB and was just able to boot from an SDI image loaded to RAM
via a USB CD-ROM with the HD physically removed. Thx-

Pedro

 

[Adora Belle Dearheart]

You were right! The image was too big! I have 515 MB of RAM and I
guess a 400 MB image does not leave enough margin. I made the image
size 200 MB and was just able to boot from an SDI image loaded to RAM
via a USB CD-ROM with the HD physically removed. Thx-

Pedro

*bows* I'm using a 200MB image myself, and it's working nicely.