Anyone know of a boot manager (preferably free) or a way that I can start the WinPE boot process from a bootable CD and have the boot.wim loaded from USB? I need to be able to boot from writable media on Intel Macs and in virtual machines but not form the machines hard drive.

I tried Plop but it does not recognize the USB drive correctly or doesn't like the way the winPE bot manager is on the usb drive. Or I need to find the right settings, even though it isn't free I may be able to get my boss to buy some licenses.

I am not sure to get it right the question, but why not using the standard BOOTMGR on CD?
It should be just a matter of adding the right entry in the \boot\BCD.
Of course the USB drive needs to be available at boot time, that could be the tricky part.
Why does the boot need to be initiated from the CD and not directly from the Usb?


jaclaz

I played around with bcd settings and could not seem to get the settings correct for it to make the switch. If it is possible I have no problem using it.

VMWare, Parallels neither support USB booting, Mac also don't like booting from USB (yet).

I have a custom image deployment tool that can be booted from USB or CD but some of the needed tools require that they are installed on writable media.

Well, if the problem is that the "BIOS" won't boot from USB, then you are pretty much stuck, i.e. you have AFAIK "ONLY" PLoP as an option.
But WHAT is the problem with it?
It is possible that the actual problem is the way the USB device has been partitioned/formatted, etc.

Or maybe but it depends on a number of factors you could boot to a DOS of some kind, access the USB through DOS drivers and then load the USB to RAM and chainload it, but it is complex and VERY prone to problems, even if it works.

Normally a USB device is not seen at "real mode" unless the BIOS maps it, and most BIOSes will map themn only if they are "boot device".
If there is USB boot support, it's another thing, you can ping-pong between USB and CD/DVD with grub4dos.
Like:

• boot from USB (in order to have USB device mapped in BIOS) to grub4dos
• pass control to BOOTMGR on CD/DVD
• have BOOTMGR on CD boot from USB placed boot.wim

but really from the scarce information you provided I cannot understand if this is what you want. (and WHY you would want such a comples setup )


Wonko

I suppose I don't have to do it this way, at first thought it seemed like this should be easier to do than it is. It would just be easir to have a generic boot CD that chain booted to the USB drive when USB booting was not available. Then I would theoretically never have to update the boot CD/ISO, I would just provide updates to the boot wim they would copy to their usb stick.

Alas it appears I will just have to modify my deployment tool and create new CD ISO's everytime it or the boot.wim is modified.