Booting WinPE from floppy

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Guest

I'm using a card that does not support booting from CD :<((. How can I boot WinPE? It appears MS used to have a KB article about that, but removed it. Anyone know the trick?

Cheers
Al Huneke
 
Al,

I'm not sure about booting PE from a floppy but if network (PXE) boot is an
option you could create a small XPe image and use it to remote boot. Then
prepare the local disk and copy the target image to the system. This is the
method we use internally. Here are some articles with more information...

http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=...apbI9GDHA.2140%40TK2MSFTNGP12.phx.gbl&rnum=12

http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=...t%24VyQEHA.3016%40tk2msftngp13.phx.gbl&rnum=1

HTH,
--
Brad Combs
Imago Technologies, LLC

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Have an opinion on the effectiveness of Microsoft Embedded newsgroups? Tell
Microsoft!
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GPSer said:
I'm using a card that does not support booting from CD :<((. How can I
Click to expand...
boot WinPE? It appears MS used to have a KB article about that, but removed
it. Anyone know the trick?
 
Just to add to that...

If you have a floppy disk option but don't have PXE enabled BIOS or NIC, you still can go for PXE based Remote boot. There are a few
floppy based solutions (PXE clients) out there. Just search on Internet (3COM, emBoot, RBFG.exe, etc.).

GPUser,
Could tell us why do you need to launch WinPE on your hardware? What are the reasons (TAP, etc.)?
If you tell us, we may be able to suggest more convenient options for you.

If USB is an option for you too, you can try to create a bootable XPe image to boot off the USB disk or so.
 
I want to run WinPE as a simple way to run TAP. I tried to boot from to DOS and run TA as a starting point, but it crashes on my board (Geode based)!! Hopefully, TAP will fare better. Thanks for the references regarding bootable CD.

Al
 
GPSer,

A few hints&questions:
- What BSOD you're stuck on using TA output? If it is popular 7B,6B, etc., you can try fixing it by adding manually necessary
critical components (IDE channels, disk driver, PCI bus, File system driver, etc.). Or you can even start without TA output but just
adding necessary components manually if you know your target hardware well.

- Can you install XP or 2K on the target hard disk (or any persistent store in there)? Then you will be able to run TAP from the
OS.

- You can use the floppy boot Bart's solution to boot from CD (WinPE) and run TAP from there.

--
Regards,
KM, BSquare Corp.

I want to run WinPE as a simple way to run TAP. I tried to boot from to DOS and run TA as a starting point, but it crashes on my
Click to expand...
board (Geode based)!! Hopefully, TAP will fare better. Thanks for the references regarding bootable CD.
 
Hi,

I use ERD 2002 from Winternals Adminpak3.0 to create a XP pro based bootable
CD
that boots to a more sofisticated WinPE style environment. it's basically
meant for recovery purposes but it can be easily used for TAP analysis.

Yaron Maor
 
Well, I'm not entirely sure if NTLDR supports CDROMs, but to boot a HDD from
a floppy is as simple as formatting it in windows and copying ntldr,
ntdetect.com and the boot.ini onto it. I guess it's possible that there's
some way to add cdrom support to the floppy in a similar way to how
cmdcons/windows setup floppys work and simply set the boot.ini to match the
CDROM's location.
 
Myne,

I think that winpe is using different ntldr build for regular CD boot.
XPe boots trough regular El-torito specification that emulate HDD on CD.
WinPE actually uses only 2048 bytes in el-torito for boot block that load
ntldr. the rest of boot process goes from regular CD files. Also common
ntoskrnl.exe has special code path that support booting from CD.

Al,
This is wrong NG for asking WinPE questions. But if you copy WinPE files to
HDD (I can't remember if you need to change folder name) and use regular
ntldr and modify boot.ini you should be able to boot WinPE from HDD.

Regards,
Slobodan
 
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