windows failed to open the ramdisk image

  • Thread starter Thread starter Luke Alcatel
  • Start date Start date
L

Luke Alcatel

I know the issue has been discussed before but it seems the cause was either
images too large for the amount of RAM or some other configuration error.

I have been using RBS and SDI ramdisk images for quite a while but it is
only recently that we have been testing on production hardware in large
scale. The image is about 90K, I set my ramdisk to be 150K to allow for a
small swap file (needed for performance monitoring) and for temp files. We
have 1GB of RAM. With the same image on the same machines, sometimes the
image loads fine and other times we get:

Windows could not start due to an error while booting from a RAMDISK.
Windows failed to open the RAMDISK image.

The hardware is high-end compact PCI Pentium-M blades. The network is
gigabit but the performance of the RBS has always appeared woeful and I
never see the link utilization above 5%. Given that the remote boot
sometimes works and sometimes doesn't I think I should be thinking about
hardware but I wanted to check with the community before confronting the
hardware vendor.

Luke
 
No repsonses here so I'd like to follow up with a related question. Per
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/d...icrosoftWindowsXPEmbeddedWithServicePack2.asp
these message mean:

If a Preboot eXecution Environment (PXE) client attempts to download an
image that is too large to run in memory, the following error message is
displayed: "Windows could not start due to an error while booting from a
RAMDISK. Windows failed to open the RAMDISK image." This error means that
the client computer does not have enough RAM for the current RamDisk image
to run.

This doesn't seem to apply to Luke's problem. It seems to me that if that
were the only explanation a much more sensible message would be:

The RAMDISK image is too large for this computer's main memory.

Are there other reasons that this message gets generated? Is there any
error checking (checksums, sequence number checks) done on the tftp packets
to insure that the image arrives intact at the client?

JT
 
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