Odd XPe problem booting from cd

  • Thread starter Thread starter GregG
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G

GregG

One of my small XPe projects consists of a master image on a mostly
stock PC that's updated weekly and distributed to two locations. Each
week I update the master disk and burn two new cd's (dvd's actually)
for the fielded PC's.

Twice now at roughly 4 month intervals my new dvd's no longer will boot
sucessfully on the master PC. I get a BSOD 0x7B(0x..., 0xc0000034) but
only on the master. The new dvd's boot just fine on the fielded PC's.
Also previous dvd copies still boot fine on both the master and fielded
PC's.

The details are I'm still pre-SP2, using a valid Product Id, my images
are fairly large, I'm burning with Nero (using a tool to set the DVD
boot id correctly), the PC's are normally diskless with boot reader and
separate burner.

To update, I use a temporary disk and a Ghost image made each week just
before prepping for the final cd burn. I do NOT rebuild from scratch
each week. My final prep technique is ewfmgr c: -enable, etprep
-delete, and then regedt32 to reduce MountedDevices to just the El
Torito disk as C:.

At the time this started, I happened to pull the PCI cards out of the
master to test some other cards but am fairly sure the original cards
went back into the same slots. Also at this time I upgraded the burner
(not the boot reader) to a newer model. I recall also having done some
H/W things the first time things began failing.

The first time I rebuilt my master image from scratch and things were
back to normal. However the build from scratch process is lengthy and
I am hoping to instead understand and maybe correct whatever is
actually causing the problem.

I admit to being baffled. The new dvd's must be good as they boot
correctly on the fielded PC's. And the master PC must be good as the
old dvd's continue to boot correctly.
 
Hi Greg. There are a few things that could be going on here to cause the
problem you described. It's interesting that the crashes occur only on your
master system and not the target systems.

First of all, I would recommend that you upgrade to SP2, not only for the
security fixes and new features, but because the EWF and El Torito
components took some fixes as well, some of which can improve the stability
and reliability of the El Torito prep and boot process.

That said, here's my best guess as to the cause of your problem with the
master system: When you change a device in the system, the system BIOS may
re-enumerate all of the devices and cause them to be reported differently to
the OS. This can occur even if you put all of the original devices back in
their original physical locations. Then when you do your updates, the
critical boot device enumeration that the OS receives from the BIOS may not
match what it's expecting, and this can cause the STOP 7B error you
mentioned. This can occur if you don't start from a pre-FBA image and let
the runtime go through FBA again.

Performing your image update from a post-FBA image should be safe as long as
the hardware configuration does not change from its pre-FBA state. But if
you make any hardware changes (even small ones), I recommend that you take
the extra precaution of running your pre-FBA image through FBA again, so
that your post-FBA image is fully up-to-date.

I hope this helps. Let me know if you have any more questions. =)

--
Matt Kellner ([email protected])
STE, Windows Embedded Group

This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.
===============================
 
Matt,
Thanks for the SP2 recommendation. I'll up my priority for carving out
budget and time to upgrade our XPe projects to SP2. Needs to happen.

Wrt my problem, I understand your comment but don't understand why the
old boot dvd's continue to boot if the bios enumeration is different.
Also I worry that rebuilding through FBA, etc. again may result in an
image that won't boot on the fielded PC's.
 
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