XPe Dual Boot, Active Partition

[Guest]

I am trying to have a dual boot system with XP Pro and XP Embedded on the
same machine.

My configuration is a single hard drive with 3 partitions. (The first
partition seems to be some Dell allocated FAT parition, it does not have a
drive letter allocated to it)

C: is XP Pro (ACTIVE PARTITION)
D: DVD Drive
E: is XPembedded

So my boot .ini has

multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP
Professional"
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(3)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Embedded"

When I try to boot XPe, I get to the First Boot Agent then it reboots. I
think this is because by XPe parition is not the active partition.

Now here is my concern. I could change it so E: (XPe) is my active
partition. My concern is that when (and if) I get XPe booted I will not be
able to change the active partition back to C: (XP Pro).

Can anyone confirm that I will be able to change the active partition from
within XPe. Do I need to include anything specifically in my XPe image?

Is there another method of dual booting so that I dont have to manually
change the active parition?

Thanks
B

 

[Adora Belle Dearheart]

I am trying to have a dual boot system with XP Pro and XP Embedded on the
same machine.

My configuration is a single hard drive with 3 partitions. (The first
partition seems to be some Dell allocated FAT parition, it does not have a
drive letter allocated to it)

C: is XP Pro (ACTIVE PARTITION)
D: DVD Drive
E: is XPembedded

So my boot .ini has

multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP
Professional"
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(3)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Embedded"

When I try to boot XPe, I get to the First Boot Agent then it reboots. I
think this is because by XPe parition is not the active partition.

Now here is my concern. I could change it so E: (XPe) is my active
partition. My concern is that when (and if) I get XPe booted I will not be
able to change the active partition back to C: (XP Pro).

Can anyone confirm that I will be able to change the active partition from
within XPe. Do I need to include anything specifically in my XPe image?

Is there another method of dual booting so that I dont have to manually
change the active parition?

Thanks
B

We have a system with two partitions. The first is a small XPe build
used for system maintenance (and for putting the main image on in the
first place, as it works out quicker to do this than just put the main
image on by PXE) and the second takes up the rest of the disk and is our
main XPe system image. Both have a boot.ini that refers only to themselves.
I manage which one boots by marking the relevant one active with diskpart.
I have a .bat file and a .txt file. The important part of the batch
files is:

diskpart /s c:\markactive.txt

The text file to switch to booting to the maintenance partition contains:
Select Disk 0
Select Partition 1
Active
Exit

and on the maintenance partition, the c:\markactive.txt marks partition
2 active so it's the main image that boots.

 

[Adora Belle Dearheart]

Oh, and while I think of it, Diskpart is in the Disk Management Command
Line Utility component.

 

[Guest]

We have a system with two partitions. The first is a small XPe build
used for system maintenance (and for putting the main image on in the
first place, as it works out quicker to do this than just put the main
image on by PXE) and the second takes up the rest of the disk and is our
main XPe system image. Both have a boot.ini that refers only to themselves.
I manage which one boots by marking the relevant one active with diskpart.
I have a .bat file and a .txt file. The important part of the batch
files is:

diskpart /s c:\markactive.txt

The text file to switch to booting to the maintenance partition contains:
Select Disk 0
Select Partition 1
Active
Exit

and on the maintenance partition, the c:\markactive.txt marks partition
2 active so it's the main image that boots.

Thanks for the information. I am not aware of diskpart, do I have to add a
particular component in "Target Designer" to get this tool?

 

[Adora Belle Dearheart]

:




Thanks for the information. I am not aware of diskpart, do I have to add a
particular component in "Target Designer" to get this tool?

....see my other posting. It's a nice little tool. We also use it for
deleting and creating partitions as we need them.

 

[Guest]

....see my other posting. It's a nice little tool. We also use it for
deleting and creating partitions as we need them.

Adora,

I added the two scripts as suggested and made my XPe parition the active
one. It start the boot process bypassing the previous menu offering a choice
to boot to the ARC paths

Windows XP Professional
Windows XP Embedded

it now boot direct to XPe. Unfortunately, XPe fails to boot due to an
fba.exe error:

"The instruction at "0x03702f5d" is referenced memory at 0x0000000c. The
Memory could not be "written""

I am now in a situation that I feared. I cannot boot to either XP pro or XPe.

HELP PLEASE!!

 

[Adora Belle Dearheart]

:




Adora,

I added the two scripts as suggested and made my XPe parition the active
one. It start the boot process bypassing the previous menu offering a choice
to boot to the ARC paths

Windows XP Professional
Windows XP Embedded

it now boot direct to XPe. Unfortunately, XPe fails to boot due to an
fba.exe error:

"The instruction at "0x03702f5d" is referenced memory at 0x0000000c. The
Memory could not be "written""

I am now in a situation that I feared. I cannot boot to either XP pro or XPe.

HELP PLEASE!!

OK you'll need to put the drive in something else and either edit the
boot.ini of the XPe partition to add XPPro as an option, or set the
active partition back to the XPPro.

 

[Guest]

OK you'll need to put the drive in something else and either edit the
boot.ini of the XPe partition to add XPPro as an option, or set the
active partition back to the XPPro.

I am using a laptop as my development machine and I do not have any means to
access this drive.

Can I boot to a USB drive and do an fdisk to change the active partition. Or
use some other function to access the boot.ini or change active partition?

 

[Adora Belle Dearheart]

:




I am using a laptop as my development machine and I do not have any means to
access this drive.

Can I boot to a USB drive and do an fdisk to change the active partition. Or
use some other function to access the boot.ini or change active partition?

....well that was... unwise.
I would never put an image on a machine I actually need for anything.
Booting to CD or USB should work fine. Especially if you can boot to
something that will allow you to run diskpart or the disk administrator.

 

[Guest]

....well that was... unwise.
I would never put an image on a machine I actually need for anything.
Booting to CD or USB should work fine. Especially if you can boot to
something that will allow you to run diskpart or the disk administrator.

OK, Adora Belle Dearheart, don't kick a man when he is down. I made a faux
pas I admit.

Fortunately, I have managed to recover the situation. For anyone else
following this, and for future refernce, here is what I did:-

I tried to boot from the USB flash drive. This had dos on it and my
partitions were ntfs so there were not recognised. I tried various dos tools
to see if I could change the active partition. But nothing was suitable.

So I booted from from the XP Install CD and when into the Recovery Console.
From there I tried the diskpart tool, but this only gave me the option to
delete a partition. So what I did was copy the boot.ini on my Windows XP Pro
parition (which allowed the option of the 2 OSs) onto the partition with
Windows XPe. When I reboot I not have the option to boot to XPPro or XPe. I
have the same boot.ini on the same partition (Adora, looking back at your
posts I think this is what you had suggested but I did not pick up on it.)

A couple of things to clear up.

1. Can I create a boot.ini from within Target Designer ? I want to have the
dual boot option in boot.ini. After I copy my Embedded Images over to the XPe
partition I then have to copy the dual boot boot.ini. I would prefer to have
the correct boot.ini created from within Target Designer.

2. I can now boot between both partions XPe and XPPro withiout having to
change the active partition [Currently XPe is active partition]. Why is this?

 

[Judah]

I know it's like years later, but I thought I would add my 2 cents since I
have experienced the same problem and determined the likely cause through
a combination of trial & error, and researching other posts on this
newsgroup...

I have seen this error come up in FBA when the device is set in Target
Designer to run from C: drive (and the associated directories for Windows
and Program Files) but it is booting from a drive other than C:.

There are two ways to deal with this. One is to change the drive letter to
the right drive before building. The other is to remap the drives
following Slobodan's drive remapping registry method, best described here:

http://groups.google.com/group/microsoft.public.windowsxp.embedded/tree/br
owse_frm/thread/8a66ee9cd63d679b/4bb9658425996274?rnum=1&_done=%2Fgroup%
2Fmicrosoft.public.windowsxp.embedded%2Fbrowse_frm%2Fthread%
2F8a66ee9cd63d679b%2F4bb9658425996274%3F

I have used both, and both work great and eliminate the FBA memory error.


Hopefully, if someone else comes across this thread with the same problem,
they will be steered more expeditiously in the right direction.

 

[Sean Liming \(eMVP\)]

There is an article that also covers dual booting on MSDN:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/d...XPE_DUALBOOTDual-BootingTipsForXPEmbedded.asp

Regards,

Sean Liming
www.sjjmicro.com / www.seanliming.com
XP Embedded Book Author - XP Embedded Advanced, XP Embedded Supplemental
Toolkit