3 replies to this topic

[Ben321]

So I FINALLY got the latest version of PXE Linux to work. It can boot ANYTHING. It doesn't care if it's antique DOS 3.3 or a newer OS like Windows XP Pro (haven't tried anything newer than that though like Windows 7).

 

But Windows itself DOES have a problem with booting in this manner. Any version of DOS boots fine, but Windows gives me a BSoD (Blue Screen of Death) when booting. I tried to boot an ISO of the install CD for Windows XP Pro, and it did successfuly start loading the Windows installer, but partway into loading (even before I got any dialog boxes asking to format the drive, or install, etc), it crashed and gave me the BSoD. Here's my cellphone pic of this screen:

http://i.imgur.com/siTS5.jpg

 

And here's my cellphone pic of the loading screen just before the crash:

http://i.imgur.com/DFy8j.jpg

 

 

 

Just before that point on the loading screen though, it quickly was running off a bunch of names of device drivers to be loading into memory so that remaining boot process would work.

 

Unfortunately I think that's probably what caused the crash. The ram-disk and associated drivers that were loaded in memory during the PXE boot process and needed to remain in memory, were probably corrupted when the loading process of the Windows Installer tried to load its own Windows drivers. This then resulted in a crash.

 

If you have any way to work around this problem, please let me know, thanks.

 

By the way, my bootloader was memdisk, and the PXE boot was done with pxelinux (both of which are from the zip package of the latest version of syslinux, that is version 5.0).

[Sha0]

This is very old news, I'm afraid.

 

Windows does not use INT 0x13 for disk/disc access, so you need a MEMDISK driver, such as WinVBlock.  Then you will not have error 0x7B.

[Ben321]

I read about that and it appears that driver MUST be in the ISO of Windows. But It's not a BartPE or WinPE setup. It's not something I can just add stuff to the Windows32 folder. It's not an already installed copy of WindowsXP. Rather it is an ISO of the standard installation CD (I ripped it from my own disk). How do I make it work properly? How do i use WinVBlock with a standard Windows XP install CD ISO?

[Sha0]

I read about that and it appears that driver MUST be in the ISO of Windows. But It's not a BartPE or WinPE setup. It's not something I can just add stuff to the Windows32 folder. It's not an already installed copy of WindowsXP. Rather it is an ISO of the standard installation CD (I ripped it from my own disk). How do I make it work properly? How do i use WinVBlock with a standard Windows XP install CD ISO?

The Microsoft Windows XP installation process allows you to use a so-called "F6 floppy" to load storage drivers.  Thus you can make a WinVBlock "F6 floppy" and use it.

 

Or, you can make an image of such a floppy and have two RAM disks: One is the .ISO as a virtual optical disc drive, one is the F6 floppy image as a virtual floppy disk drive.  Since MEMDISK only allows you to produce one RAM disk at a time, you'd have to invoke it twice.

 

Since it is complicated to do this, most people use GRUB4DOS to establish the two RAM disks for this scenario (installing Windows XP and using an F6 floppy).  GRUB4DOS can be booted via PXE directly, or via PXELINUX.