[syslinux] 1 model out of a dozen hangs at"loadingboot sector... booting..."

Shao Miller Shao.Miller at yrdsb.edu.on.ca
Wed Apr 27 17:46:59 PDT 2011


On 4/27/2011 19:06, Alexander,Jeff wrote:
> The casualty of the day is an HP 8100 Elite CMT. It has a completely 
> different symptom though. It gets past the 'loading boot sector... 
> booting' screen and you see the progress bar that says 'Windows is 
> loading files...' and then it goes to a blank screen with a blinking 
> cursor in the top left corner for a second and then a completely blank 
> screen and that is all she wrote.

Did you try each MEMDISK memory option?  Also, could you possibly try:

   APPEND harddisk=hd32 iso

How much RAM does the system have and how big is the .ISO image file?

> I am wondering if you think it might have to do with the problem 
> described in the MEMDISK wiki in section 3.4 " INT 13h access: Not all 
> images will boot completely!" where it mentions WinVBlock and Firadisk.

I don't think so, no.  As the previous link to an article attempts to 
explain, booting your Windows PE entails two RAM disks; one is MEMDISK's 
and the other is a Windows RAM disk.  Once the Windows kernel is booted, 
the MEMDISK is silently (and wastefully) discarded and only the Windows 
RAM disk is used; you do not require a Windows MEMDISK driver in this case.

If your Windows PE was, instead, something like BartPE with WinVBlock 
incorporated, you'd skip the "inner" (Windows) RAM disk and the .ISO 
image file would the only RAM disk.

> I am also wondering if the way I have winpe packaged is the best 
> solution. I used the guide here: 
> http://etherboot.org/wiki/winpe_memdisk. I am curious if other methods 
> may be successful.

The MEMDISK -> .WIM method means two RAM disks and the RAM requirement 
is twice what it would be with just one or the other.  I don't use 
Windows > 2003 and I don't know of a guide for creating a non-WIM PE for 
Windows >= Vista.  Sorry.

> If you feel this is no longer a syslinux issue and that I shouldn't 
> post this problem here then let me know but I was hoping someone could 
> point me in the right direction.

If it's a MEMDISK bug, this seems like the right e-mail list to me.

- Shao Miller



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