Re: What in the heck am I doing wrong? NTFS boot disk

Stormblade,

Some of problems belong to MS feature, some to MS bug, some are related to
BIOS problems.
All partitioning formatting tools need to know correct LCHS geometry used by
BIOS on target computer to map your disk. In during the boot this values do
not match then you will get weird problems during the real-mode boot phase.

It is a feature in a way how disk.sys driver is implemented if you look at
the source in DDK:
You will see that function DiskIoctlGetDriveGeometryEx
(IOCTL_DISK_GET_DRIVE_GEOMETRY_EX) will test if removable flag is set and if
it is then it will skip geometry copy phase.
So that any utility from user mode won't be able to read disk geometry from
driver.

Also you can't partition removable disk from window you can use first
existing partition or you can use whole disk as one partition. (This is also
a feature by design)

All infos collected by ntldr and ntdetect are stored in:
HKLM\Hardware\DESCRIPTION\System\MultifunctionAdapter\7\DiskController\xxxx\DiskPeripheral\yyyyyy\Configuration
Data

So you can access these infos if you want by your program.

There are times due to bad design of some BIOS-es and one or both of
ntdetect and ntldr programs when disk and its entries are not listed in
above mentioned values.
Since BIOS return at least elemental information's about disk number and its
geometry problem is more MS oriented then BIOS. (Expecting all BIOS-es to
comply with some unusual undocumented MS requirements is just not realistic)


You have a simple work-around.
1. Do not use partitions.
2. Format disk with "format.exe /T: /N:" if you know geometry for your disk
on certain computer you should be able to set it trough these switches.

Or make a program that will read these values from registry and put them in
BPB.

Regards,
Slobodan

"Stormblade" <Stormblade@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:094EEFD2-D523-410C-B121-A4DE50958312@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> It is by design that XPe is incapable of formating a CF marked as
> removable
> into a bootable state? thats a bug!
>
> Yes I can get the CF into a bootable state using a WinPE boot disk.
> But we do not have a licence to distribute a WinPE boot disk with the
> product.
> It is not possible to get an XPe Boot CD to format a CF disk and make it
> bootable.
> This means that I cannot create a recovery CD using XPe...
>
>
> "Andy Allred [MS]" wrote:
>
>> What bug in XP/Win2k are you referring to? Is the CF marked as removable
>> media? If so then this is by design. Searching the newsgroup archives has
>> many explanations of how to get your CF in a state where it's bootable.
>>
>> Andy
>> --
>> Embedded team blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/embedded/
>>
>> This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no
>> rights.
>>
>>
>>
>> "Stormblade" <Stormblade@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
>> news:8F4A13BF-A87B-46F3-9EE9-DEDEE57E43D2@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
>> >
>> >> > Do I really have to format these drives from DOS in order to get
>> >> > them
>> >> > to
>> >> > boot?
>> >>
>> >> You most likely have to (it sometimes veries on the BIOS, MB and HDD
>> >> brands
>> >> you use) to keep the right disk geometry factors.
>> >>
>> >> > This seems like a very strange situation...
>> >>
>> >> Well.. It is not. If you search MS KB database, you wil see that they
>> >> recommend using DOS for preparing media for NT/2K/XP.
>> >>
>> > I have been banging my head against this one for ages now... In a
>> > product
>> > which uses XPe, I have a requirement to be able to do a clean
>> > re-install
>> > of
>> > the compact flash from a bootable CD, fine, make a bootable XPe disk
>> > for
>> > the
>> > product which will format the CF and copy all the files to it... but
>> > this
>> > doesn't work, formatting the CF in XPe makes a mess of the NTFS
>> > partition
>> > header...
>> > And MS say I have to use DOS to format... does that mean I have to pay
>> > for
>> > a
>> > licence for DOS as well as a licence for XPe for each product, just to
>> > be
>> > able to reinstall the XPe OS in the field????
>> > All this because of a BUG in XPe (and XP/Win2k as well it seems), that
>> > makes
>> > it incapable of formatting the CF properly.
>> >
>>
>>
>>


.

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