FW: [syslinux] pxelinux and bar

Sun Nov 13 15:31:03 PST 2005

Have a look at the 911cd forums. I wrote the initial thread on RAM
booting WinPE.

To answer to question... memdisk won't work with Windows. Windows uses
32bit access (direct HW access) and memdisk relies on the BIOS. Any
programs that don't use the BIOS disk interfaces will not work. The
other problem is the allocation of memory. Windows doesn't respect the
memdisk allocation.

However it is possible using the supported RAM disk booting, but only by
using the Windows 2003 ramdisk.sys ramdisk.inf ntldr, ntdetect and
startrom.com.

In short you dump the ISO image containing the updated ramdisk.sys/.inf
to your tftp root. Create a pxeliniux config to load the startrom.bs
(startrom.com renamed). Have the ntldr (setupldr.exe) and NTdetect.com
in the root also. Create a WINNT.SIF in the root.

[SetupData]
BootDevice = "ramdisk(0)"
BootPath = "\i386\System32\"
OsLoadOptions = "/noguiboot /fastdetect /minint /rdexportascd
/rdpath=2\winpe.iso"
;OsLoadOptions = "/noguiboot /fastdetect /minint /rdimageoffset=36352
/rdpath=2\bartpe.sdi"

That should get you started. There a heap of threads now on the topic at
911cd forums. See my original thread.

http://www.911cd.net/forums//index.php?showtopic=9685&hl=

If you want to load a variety of images, then the only existing way is
to patch startrom.com and ntldr.

The other interesting thing is SDI images. You make these with the MS
Win XP Embedded tools. They work the same as ISOs, but are RW too. No
need for a secondary RAM disk. They also support FAT32 or NTFS with
compression. Note the 512MB limit still applies unfortunately. 

Rob

-----Original Message-----
From: syslinux-bounces at zytor.com [mailto:syslinux-bounces at zytor.com]On
Behalf Of Sebastian Tyler SSgt WPC/J6G
Sent: Thursday, 10 November 2005 9:14 PM
To: Grant Gossett; syslinux at zytor.com
Subject: RE: [syslinux] pxelinux and bar

Grant, 

I think you're over-engineering your solution. I use the keeppxe option
along with 3COM's universal NDIS driver, and it works great on
everything we have (which includes quite a variety of NICs).

If you really want to go the WinPE route, though, have a look at this
thread: http://www.911cd.net/forums/index.php?showtopic=11048&hl=

SSgt Josh Sebastian
USAFE WPC/J6G
DSN 314-489-7953
Comm +49 (631) 536 7953
-----Original Message-----
From: syslinux-bounces at zytor.com [mailto:syslinux-bounces at zytor.com] On
Behalf Of Grant Gossett
Sent: Thursday, November 10, 2005 1:17 AM
To: syslinux at zytor.com
Subject: [syslinux] pxelinux and bar

Has anyone been able to boot a bartpe image successfully using pxelinux
or 
does anyone know if this is impossible?

For those who don't know, bartpe is a legitimate way to make a trimmed 
down installation of Windows XP or Server 2003 using your installation 
media.

For more information on bartpe see:
http://www.nu2.nu/pebuilder

Basically the pebuilder gathers the minimum files needed to boot into a 
32-bit windows kernel and adds some functionality like a desktop and so 
forth and puts them into a build environment.

In most cases, people just use the build environment to create a
bootable 
CD ROM with bartpe on it (via mkisofs), however, there is a way to move 
the bartpe installation to a hard drive partition. See "number 3" here
for 
details:
http://home.arcor.de/tele_tom/pqmagic.htm

I have followed the above procedure and have a (MS-DOS 7.0 (win98) fdisk

created) 270 Meg FAT16 partition booting into bartpe (it is the first
and 
only partition on a 10 gig drive). One of the things I did a little 
differently as compared to the #3 procedure to get it on the hard drive 
was that I copied setuploader.bin (NTLDR) and ntdetect.com to the 
partition first before I copied the rest of the build environment. Also,
I 
used a different method to make that partition active (gdisk, which is 
part of ghost), but the point is this hard drive boots into bartpe.

I also attempted this with a FAT32 partition, but saw slightly different

results, which I will detail further down the post, but I'm pretty sure
it 
just has to do with different DOS boot records for FAT and FAT32. It
also 
may be related to "fixboot" which is also part of the above procedure.

Next I moved the hard drive to the linux box where I have pxelinux
running 
so I could make an image of the hard drive for memdisk to use (if it
can). 
I understand that memdisk isn't guaranteed to work with "non-DOS" OSes
but 
I thought I'd give it a try. If anyone else has a better suggestion I'll

give it a try, but my overall goal here is to boot to a PE-like OS and
be 
able to use the 32-bit version of ghost with 32-bit windows NIC drivers 
(as opposed to DOS ghost with flakey or non-existant NDIS 2 drivers).

So to make the disk image, I first figure out how many "blocks" to copy 
using "fdisk -u -l /dev/hdb1". This prints the starting and ending 
information for the partition in sectors:
.
.
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 bytes = 512 bytes
device          boot    start   end             blocks          id
system
/dev/hdb1       *       63      562774          281106          6 FAT16

So I use dd to make the img file:

dd if=/dev/hdb of=/tftpboot/bartpe.img bs=512 count=562774 (I've also 
tried a count of 562775 in case I'm "off by one")

Ok so here is the problem (and it is likely I might be stuck here)

When I use memdisk by itself to boot the image, it crashes.
When I use the raw parameter, it says Missing Operating System (FAT 16 
partition) or it says NTLDR is missing (FAT 32 partition)
Same story with bigraw parameter and respective filesystems.

Does anyone have any advice or is this impossible to do using memdisk or

any of the other pxelinux facilities?

p.s. - I'm going on vacation tomorrow so I may not be able to respond
with 
feedback far a week or so.

thanks
Grant

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