Re: Problems with Booting XPe from CD-ROM

Hi Alexander. I'll try to address your issues below.

First off, if you're using a USB CD-ROM drive for your bootable CD-ROM
device, you will need to ensure that you're using Feature Pack 2007, which
includes support for booting from USB devices. Make sure you include the
"USB 2.0 Boot" component in your runtime, which will bring in all of the
components needed to support this feature.

There should be no particular reason why EWF should fail as it appears to
have here while using the Command Shell. The specific error you encountered
here may have been due to a bad FBA run during a previous runtime setup -
usually you can just redeploy your runtime (or rebuild and redeploy if
necessary), or you can also delete the EWF partition using DISKPART from the
safebuild. The EWF partition is setup during FBA.

As for the failure to swap drive letters: This may have something to do with
the USB support (or lack thereof), since your CD-ROM drive is connected via
USB.

Also, two common causes of drive-letter-swap failure are that the Pre-FBA El
Torito CD wasn't in the drive during FBA *AND* when etprep was run, or that
the Pre-FBA CD was either a different size than the hard drive partition
being processed (500 MB on CD vs. 600 MB on the HDD) or has a different El
Torito signature value (settable in Target Designer - we recommend you leave
it on the default setting).

In the first case above, you need to make sure the Pre-FBA CD is in the
drive right from the start of FBA, and that it remains there until FBA is
finished. You can take the CD out to install software or perform other
operations once FBA is finished, but you'll need to make sure you put it
back in before running etprep -all. This is because etprep scans all of the
devices to find the El Torito volume so it knows which drive letters to
swap. I realize this is an inconvenient process, but it's unfortunately the
way this one works.

As for partition/CD sizes and signatures: Internally, Windows identifies a
volume by both its signature (this gets set during FBA and can be modified
in the El Torito component) and by its partition size. A different
partition size will yield a different overall identifier. During FBA, the
system does a scan of all volumes and records the IDs of the volumes in each
physical device. It will record an entry for the El Torito volume on the
Pre-FBA CD at this time and associate it with the physical CD-ROM device and
its arc path. When you go to swap the drive letters with etprep, this scan
is performed again, and etprep then compares the active partition with the
El Torito volume if it finds one. The IDs have to match between the two in
order for the letter swap to occur - otherwise, the process will fail and
nothing will be swapped. This is why the partition size and signature of
the primary partition have to match those of the Pre-FBA CD. Note that the
Pre-FBA CD does not actually have to be bootable or contain any
information - it just needs to be a clone of the primary partition's layout.

I successfully tested a USB-based El Torito Boot scenario during testing of
Feature Pack 2007, and found that the only additional step in the process
was to make sure the USB 2.0 Boot component and its dependencies were
included in the runtime. I hope all of this helps. :)

--
Matt Kellner
SDET, Microsoft Windows XP Embedded Test Team

This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.
"Alexander" <boegelsack@xxxxxx> wrote in message
news:1170065974.657568.168590@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Hello,
I've tried to boot a XP Embedded image from CD-ROM like described in
Chapter 11 of the XP Embedded Advanced book from Sean D. Liming. My
target is the Pentium based VMEBus Single Board Computer VR9 from SBS,
the HD is a 6 GB Microdrive from Hitachi, my drive is the DVD-R/-RW
drive SD-R6112 from Toshiba. Because there is no possiblity to connect
further IDE devices to that board, I've connected the driver via an
adapter to an USB port of the target board.
The image has been generated by first importing the Target Analyzer
informations about my target board and then adding the necessary EWF
and El Torito components and the Command Shell like described in the
book.
The first problem I have encountered is that after having booted the
image from disk with the Pre-FBA El Torito Disk in the drive ewfmgr
reported "Unable to find an Ewf volume" and ewfmgr c: reported "Failed
getting protected volume configuration with error 1" also the contents
of fbalog.txt showed that the EWF volume had been created. Diskpart
also found the 32 KB EWF volume after the two primary partitions I had
created on the disk (C: 160 MB, D: 900 MB). Furthermore the El Torito
disk had not been found.
I've solved this problem by replacing the Command Shell component by
the Task Manager Shell like in the EWF example in Chapter 10 of the
book from Sean Liming. Now my el torito disk had been found and ewfmgr
and ewfmgr c: yielded the expected outputs like described in the book.
In the explorer the following three partitions were visible:
C: 160 MB
D: 899 MB
F: 160 MB
E is the DVD drive. I assume that F is the El Torito drive generated
by the El Torito driver.

But now if I call etprep -all I get the following messages:
Deleted EWF partitions = 1
Start value for Redbook/IMAPI services has been reset to zero.
Failed to swap El Torito disk drive letter. Error = 0x1.

After that the system automatically reboots which ends with a BSOD
with the following outputs:
STOP: c000007b {Bad Image}
The application or DLL \??\C:\WINDOWS\system32\shsvcs.dll is not a
valid windows image. Please check this against your installation
diskette.

Every reboot brings this Blue Screen again.

So my two questions are: Why I need the Task Manager Shell to let the
El Torito Disk found and let ewfmgr find the EWF volume and why the
swapping of the disk drive letters get failed (I assume that the Blue
Screen is a consequence of this). I've read in a message on this topic
that USB drives will not function. Is this really true?

Who can help me? Any hint will be appreciated.



.

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