[syslinux] memdisk parameters in windows pe.

[Shao Miller]

On 10/25/2012 13:04, Zerø Sum wrote:
> ...from all the documentation i'm pretty sure it's not possible in 
> memdisk, but i read somewhere of a memdisk.c32 in development by shao 
> miller which would allow something similar, as far as i understood 
> (which could actually be quite little). have there been news about the 
> project, was it scrapped or is it still ongoing?

Good day, Alex.

The experimental mdisk.c32 seemed to work, but it wasn't the Right Way 
to do the job. When H. Peter and I last discussed it, I believe such a 
feature was going to have to wait until either Syslinux 5 or 6 (I can't 
remember exactly which).

But what you could do right now is to pass MEMDISK multiple 
_uncompressed_ initrds to compose your virtual HDD, as in:

LABEL foo
KERNEL memdisk
INITRD mbr.bin,62_empty.bin,standard.ntfs,specific.fat

Where mbr.bin would be a bootable MBR with two partitions in its 
partition table, 62_empty.bin could be 62 * 512 bytes of zeroes, 
standard.ntfs would be an NTFS partition image with Windows installed on 
it, and specific.fat could be a small FAT partition with 
client-specific, or even potentially dynamically-generated files in it 
that the Windows installation could process via startup script.

Of course, mbr.bin, 62_empty.bin and standard.ntfs could all be one 
file, since they'd likely be unchanging.

Does this help?

Some time ago now, there was another request on this mailing-list for an 
mdiskchk for Windows. I thought it'd take about a day to produce and I 
started coding it, but didn't complete it, unfortunately.

- Shao Miller