El Torito CD is painfully slow

  • Thread starter Thread starter Rob Neff
  • Start date Start date
R

Rob Neff

Wow, I finally got the El Torito CD to boot up on its own (no HD, no errors,
just the CD-ROM and a RAMDrive). However, it takes about 10 minutes to boot
up, and another 10 minutes to start the main app (some of which requires
downloading from the local net for files we don't want to burn on a CD).
The equivalent process on a HD boots up and runs in about 4 minutes total
(1/5th the time).

Any hints to speed this up? Defragging the disk before hd2iso didn't seem
to make much difference.

TIA,
Rob
 
Hi Rob,

What is the size of your image? Also CD drive max speed and processor speed?

I'm using custom RAM boot from CD. Image size that need to be loaded by my
bootloader from CD is ~52MB.
CD load time ~1 min. Start-up with PnP hardware detections ~50 seconds. But
this depends on processor power of device.

Good side of this solution is that you can remove boot CD from drive. Also
you can write any files you need to OS visible part of CD.


Regards,
Slobodan
 
Well, we're not nearly as streamlined as you! Our total image is 470 MB,
with a Via C3 CPU (don't know the speed, but it's rated from 733MHz to 1GHz)
and an 8x Quanta CD/DVD drive.

Is your bootloader stored in CF?

Rob
 
Sorry, my solution is not applicable to you.

My boot loader is less than 512 Bytes, and followed by SDI image. They are
both located CD.
Also I'm using this SDI file for remote boot, and for USB Disk boot I'm
using another boot loader.

I'm using this image only for auto deployment of another working image to
HDD, and initial configuration of device.

Regards,
Slobodan
 
Hi,

can you give me some details on how did you manage creating a bootable USB
disk with a Ram drive?
this is exactly my current mission and I'm trying to figure-out the process
using SDI and how to make it bootable.

thanks,

Yaron Maor
 
To simplify things for you:

First you need to conduct little experiment with your USB disk and target
device.
Check if you can boot ntldr. from USB disk.

put boot.ini with two entries and with timeout of let say 30 seconds to see
if ntldr. can be started on your device. You will have multi os choice
shown.
For this experiment you need only ntdlr. and boot.ini, also disk must be
bootable and bios must be able to boot it.

Easy steps if you can do them:
1. Mark USB disk as non-removable. (Optional, but needed for NTFS)
2. Create NTFS partition.
3. Mark partition active.
4. Copy ntldr. and boot.ini to this partition.
5. Try to boot.

I was able to do this on my development machine, but not on my target
device, so I had to write custom bootloader that uses following doc for RAM
booting, after the image is in memory.
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/dnxpesp1/ht
ml/ram_sdi.asp
Also check int 15h, AH=87h you will probably need it to load data in memory
address space above 1MB.



If you are able to get multi os choice, then you can use ntldr. feature of
ram boot from SDI file.
Read following search results how to modify boot.ini to RAM boot from SDI
file on HDD.
http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=rdpath&btnG=Go
ogle+Search&meta=group%3Dmicrosoft.public.windowsxp.embedded.*



Regards,
Slobodan


I'm using
 
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