[syslinux] Windows 2000 boot to ram

[Luciano Miguel Ferreira Rocha]

On Sat, Oct 23, 2004 at 10:40:28PM +0200, Dietmar Stölting wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> I found a strange behavior in memdisk:
> 
> I build an image of Windows 2000 (Fat32) with geometric of
> C=115 H=255 S=63. I testet it as a real harddisk and it works.
> I boot it to ram with memdisk initrd=w2000.img from my first harddrive, as
> discribed to boot  with syslinux.
> It crashs with reboot, the time is to short to recognice the appearing
> letters before reboot. (Can I stop the screen?)
> 
> Thats nothing new to me, I know this behavior from many USB Sticks.
> If I change the geometrie to C=229 H=128 S=63 it stops with NTLDR not found.
> 
> But an image with Windows 98 boots to ram  with memdisk as described above.
> (I don't know, why the CD Rom and the harddrive only works in 16 Bit mode,
> terrible...)

16 bits only because the harddisk only exists through a bios hook. In
32 mode windows bypasses the bios and talks directly to the hardware. In
the memdisk case, that hardware doesn't exist!

I don't think windows 2000 supports bios only devices.

But maybe it supports some form of memdisks (like microsoft's
ramdrive?).

Aren't there some projects on the Internet about making windows 2k/xp
boot on a cd?

Regards,
Luciano Rocha