XPe Bootable CD

[archilea]

Well, I'll chime in and add to the list of users that are unable to
get an XPe CD Image to boot. After spending the better part of a week
on this, I'm about ready to throw in the towel and upgrade our units
manually. I have just over 300+ in the field. :/

I've created an image that includes the following components:
- USB 2.0 Boot
- Enhanced Write Filter
- EWFMGR
- El Torito CD Support
and some other various components.

I then PXE booted my target hardware to an XPe image over the network,
which uses a RAMDisk for the OS and allows me to access my target's
physical drives. I then follow these steps:
1. Diskpart:
- Clean the volumes
- Create a 700MB primary partition
- Make the partition active
- Assign it letter M:
2. Format M: to NTFS with compression on
3. Copy my CDBoot Image files to M:
4. Reboot the system
5. With a pre-FBA CDROM disk in the drive, I let the system go through
FBA
6. I then add some files, tweak settinngs, etc.
7. Turn on EWF (EWFMGR shows "ENABLE" as the pending command)
8. Run ETPREP -all
9 PXE boot and use hd2iso to create an el-torito iso image
10. Burn the image to CD
11. Try to boot.

I can successfully boot this system to a WinPE disk or to a BartPE
disk. When I boot this disk, however, I get a message that reads:
Searching for El Torito bootable Image ... Found a Bootable CD

Then the system spins up the CDROM drive and I get a blinking cursor
in the upper left corner of the screen.


Some things that bother me:
1. My system is USB 1.1 - Does this impact me?
2. My system boots fine from the primary drive, even after I run
ETPREP -all... I tought it was supposed to blue-screen?
3. If I let it sit at the blinking cursor for a while (5-10 minutes),
it starts printing ascii characters to the screen in seemingly random
locations.

Help!
Desi

 

[KM]

Desi,

I added a few comments/questions inline...

Well, I'll chime in and add to the list of users that are unable to
get an XPe CD Image to boot. After spending the better part of a week
on this, I'm about ready to throw in the towel and upgrade our units
manually. I have just over 300+ in the field. :/

I've created an image that includes the following components:
- USB 2.0 Boot

Is your CDROM drive connected via USB or IDE?
Is latter, why do you need USB 2.0 components?

- Enhanced Write Filter
- EWFMGR
- El Torito CD Support
and some other various components.

I then PXE booted my target hardware to an XPe image over the network,
which uses a RAMDisk for the OS and allows me to access my target's
physical drives. I then follow these steps:
1. Diskpart:
- Clean the volumes
- Create a 700MB primary partition
- Make the partition active
- Assign it letter M:
2. Format M: to NTFS with compression on
3. Copy my CDBoot Image files to M:
4. Reboot the system
5. With a pre-FBA CDROM disk in the drive, I let the system go through
FBA
6. I then add some files, tweak settinngs, etc.
7. Turn on EWF (EWFMGR shows "ENABLE" as the pending command)
8. Run ETPREP -all

At this point, can you go to regedit at runtime and see if the etprep actually swapped the drive letters?
Better, though, if you delete the HKLM\System\MountedDevices key completely.

9 PXE boot and use hd2iso to create an el-torito iso image
10. Burn the image to CD
11. Try to boot.

I can successfully boot this system to a WinPE disk or to a BartPE
disk. When I boot this disk, however, I get a message that reads:
Searching for El Torito bootable Image ... Found a Bootable CD

Then the system spins up the CDROM drive and I get a blinking cursor
in the upper left corner of the screen.


Some things that bother me:
1. My system is USB 1.1 - Does this impact me?

Only if you are trying to boot off USB CDROM. If this is the case, you are probably out of luck. USB 1.1 is too slow.

2. My system boots fine from the primary drive, even after I run
ETPREP -all... I tought it was supposed to blue-screen?

Why shoud it? In fact, it should not blue screen there at all. You can perfectly boot Eltorito image of that hard disk.
If EWF is on, you can safely boot it from the drive as many times as needed.

3. If I let it sit at the blinking cursor for a while (5-10 minutes),
it starts printing ascii characters to the screen in seemingly random
locations.

Sounds like you *are* using USB CDROM. See the comments above then.
Otherwise, I'd add the following:
- non-zero timeout to boot.ini
- /SOS swtich to boot.ini to see what drivers are loaded
- check FBALog.txt after FBA is done.

 

[archilea]

Thanks, Konstantin - I managed to get an SDI imageto boot via a USB
1.1 port using the RamDisk driver. This is really what I wanted to do
all along, so I'm not pursuing the CD boot any longer.

The comment about the blue screen was in response to another post
where the user received a blue screen after running the etprep command
- Someone replied that it was normal to bluescreen after that
operation... I was just looking for areas where my own experience was
different from what others were reporting, so that I could identify
what I did wrong...


~Desi

 

[KM]

Desi,

I see. Yes, RAM boot is probably the only stable option for USB 1.1 Boot.
I am glad it fits your needs.

It is still possible to make it boot (not just RAM boot) an XPe image off a USB 1.1 device but than some modifications in USB drive
load order and critical database in registry need to be done first. And even then it may not work as stable as the USB 2.0 boot
stack in FP2007. I am wondering though if USB boot nt detect component from FP2007 would make a difference.

--
=========
Regards,
KM

Thanks, Konstantin - I managed to get an SDI imageto boot via a USB
1.1 port using the RamDisk driver. This is really what I wanted to do
all along, so I'm not pursuing the CD boot any longer.

The comment about the blue screen was in response to another post
where the user received a blue screen after running the etprep command
- Someone replied that it was normal to bluescreen after that
operation... I was just looking for areas where my own experience was
different from what others were reporting, so that I could identify
what I did wrong...


~Desi