I'm exhausted; sorry if this isn't very coherent... Had to try out that ram drive in PE last night. it worked too on the first try, 64 MB - thanks for the pointer SAM: re the AR RamSoft Driver.

Anyway, I've read through the recent thread on installing WinPE to HD and followed the directions from the official documentation to the letter, but it's not working. I have 7 partitions spread across two hard drives (~160 GB total) which further complicates things. On 1st HD I have my primary OS installed on first partition (XP SP1a Pro). This is my main OS. I have an installation of WIN2K Pro installed on smallish (~6 GB) partition adjacent to my main OS. I installed them both as primary partitions and boot directly to them rather than bootstrapping. The rest of the disk contains other junk in a logical partition, except for the *very* last 31 MB, where I've installed a mini FAT partition so that I could experiment with BootMagic (Which doesn't install on NTFS). I ran diskpart just to capture the output quickly to paste in here; I use PMAGIC 8 for partitioning. Now, where I tried creating MiniNT is on the volume labeled RESCUE (hopefully the lines don't get munged in the post). The asterisks I inserted myself, just to denote the absense of a drive letter (from within my current environment). Naturally, the active partition will always have drive letter C.

The instructions are pretty straightforward, so basically what I need to know is *how* to tell the operating system to boot from that partition; simply making it active won't do the trick. I copied the directory structures exactly how Bart described it (which is also exactly how the documentation describes the process); there is no mention of the command console as being a requirement from either source; IIRC, that may be required for only the non-SP1 versions? There must be some *directive* I'm missing and need to put somewhere; perhaps in the boot.ini on the first partition of the first hard disk. I added the partition to BootMagics menu, but it doesn't work. Any thoughts?

@Crash

Normally, you can add lines in boot.ini to boot from anywhere. The format of the line will depend on whether you have IDE or SCSI drive. Assuming you have IDE, you currently have a line in boot.ini similar to
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(1)\WINDOWS="..."

Where, rdisk(0) is the first disk drive, rdisk(1) the second drive; partition(1) is the first partition where \WINDOWS is. The numbers below will depend on where the RESCUE volumes is. I do not have DISKPART, but I assume your RESCUE is on the second volume of your second harddisk? For that, add a line such as
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(1)partition(2)\minnt_dir="MinNT comment"
where minnt_dir is the dirctory where you installed minnt.

During the boot, you can select this from the intial menu. I have not tried installing pe on a harddisk (yet), but I boot many os from many volumes this way.

Note that the volume/partition number you use in boot.ini has no correlation to any drive letter mapping you might have done in your final o/s. The numbers you use here is the physical volume number starting with 1 on either disk.

BTW, where is the post of instructions for installing minint on hardrive? I missed it...

I'm interested in doing this too but I get ntoskrnl.exe not found when I try to boot into it.
Found it, it is on the bootable cds forum here

Copied the missing file and added this to boot.ini...

multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(3)\minint="PE" /fastdetect

...and it's looking for the 'system' hive in system32\config -- which is where it is in windows but not in pe.

@Crash

I think that error msg means, the boot.ini you entered/selected is pointing at a different volume than you intended, or of couse that volume does not contain the specified file in the correct place. Search in a working xp volume to see where that file is.

@Bazz

Well, that means your boot.ini setup is correct and you are reaching the right place. So the problem most likely is in the construction of the disk based PE. I have not done this, so cannot really help you there.

I've tried HD- install but anyone knows how can i make the partition BOOTABLE?

I'm thinking about booting a DOS disk and run a FDISK /MBR.

I've booted from WinPe-CD and formatted partition and copied data, but i'll like to make the C: partition bootable from within the cd booted disk, before restarting and trying hd boot.

Any idea?

you can use diskpart and select the partition you want to make bootable and mark it as active with the command 'active'

rc

Hi,

the problems to boot WinPE from a harddisk with more than one partition (e.g. one partition with WinXP and another with WinPE) resides on the first boot time (the boot loader). WinXP uses the NTLDR and WinPE must be started with the SETUPLDR.BIN!

NTLDR shows the boot-menu (which is defined at BOOT.INI) for the selection of the boot-partition, but it's impossible to continue the boot process for WinPE correct. On the other hand, SETUPLDR.BIN don't show any boot-menu, so you cannot start an other OS than the WinPE (or the normal WinXP-Setup).

If you will boot WinPE from a machine with more than one harddisk partition (on one, or more than one physically drive) you must use an other boot-manager than the original WinXP boot-manager.

Regards

Old_Newcomer

Hi,

I have tried many options to boot WinPE from an other partition as the primary boot partition. It seems, that it's impossible and this is a design limitation!

It's not simple to boot WinPE from the harddisk, but the safest way is:

1. Install CMDCONS, this will make a CMDCONS-directory with many files and subdirectories at the root of the boot-partition. The important files are the BOOTSEC.DAT at the CMDCONS-directory and the CMLDR at the root-directory. BOOTSEC.DAT is the "normal" harddisk boot sector of WinNT, but the name of the boot loader is changed from NTLDR to CMLDR. The BOOT.INI hase an additional entry of C:\CMDCONS\BOOTSECT.DAT="Microsoft Windows XP ..." /cmdcons to load the modified boot sector and than to load CMLDR. CMLDR is the renamed and unmodified SETUPLDR.BIN which would be loaded at the normal setup and also at the boot of WinPE.

If you tray to copy all the WinPE stuff onto the CMDCONS-directory, WinPE will not start correct this way. You must make a second step.

2. Copy all the WinPE stuff of the i386-directory with all subdirectories to a directory named MININT at the root of the boot partition C:. You must also copy the TXTSETUP.SIF from the MININT-directory to the CMDCONS-directory. You can delete all additional files and subdirectories of the CMDCONS-directory, only the files BOOTSEC.DAT, NTDETECT.COM and TXTSETUP.SIF must be stay on the CMDCONS-directory!

With this way you can boot WinPE from the boot partition C: of the first harddisk. The limitations are by the design of the boot process of WinNT/2000/XP. The only way to boot WinPE from an other partition is to use an other harddisk boot manager as the WinNT/2000/XP boot manager.

Best regards

Old_Newcomer

isn't there supposed to be a "/minint" at the end of the line:

multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(3)minint="PE" /fastdetect /minint

just a thought...

Hi tox,

the /minint switch is not a BOOT.INI option for the NTLDR, this switch is inside of the TXTSETUP.SIF as the OsLoadOption.

The WinPE must be booted with the SETUPLDR.BIN and not with the NTLDR, so that Arc-names are not usable, only BIOS drive letters are possible to point to the boot drive. This is all by design of the boot process and only the CMDCONS construction with the MININT-directory can be used to boot WinPE from harddisk.

I have never tried this with a secondary harddisk(-partition), but a boot-manager, which can boot an operating-system on a primary partition of a secondary harddisk, should be able to boot WinPE in such a configuration.

Regards

Old_Newcomer

Yep, XOSL will do this just fine. I inserted a smallish HD as a lone primary master, setup XP, proved it booted then reattached my other 2 drives and changed the PE disk to the secondary slave position. Installed XOSL and told it to ACTIVATE PARTITION, FIX FAT DRIVE NUMBER and SWAP DRIVES in the XOSL setup for the PE boot.

I boot 98, XP and PE all off the same PC's drives. 98 and XP off the first drive, data on the second and the small one for PE.