XPe El-Torito vs XP El-Torito

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Hallo,
i'm trying to deploy a 300MB XPe run-time image to a Liteline/Mitac 5033 Notebook (AMD K6-2 400MHz, 160MB Ram, 5GB HDD, Toshiba XM-7002B CD-ROM). I created a XPe bootable El-Torito CD that does work on another (more modern) pc but doesn't bootup at the notebook. It just skips the cd-rom and goes on booting from HDD (standard Windows XP). XP Professional Setup CD boots up fine so boot order should be ok.

So, is it possible that the XPe bootable El-Torito cd maybe checks for already installed os'es and skips booting from cd?

The cd media is readable. The currently installed XP shows the cd name in explorer. The disc itself is empty in explorer (by design like stated in xpe docs).

The notebook is capable of booting the windows xp setup cd so why doesn't it boot the xpe boot cd-rom? Don't they both have the same El-Torito standard based mechanism to start the cd? I'm not sure if i should remove the active flag from the hdd partition to force a cd boot (in case its a boot order problem). It needs more than 10min to boot into recovery console with XP setup cd to change that (with that notebook).

I'm currently out of ideas how to deploy the image. My first idea was to use a live cd, set the partition active and copy the image by file copy (winrar or similar) or with Winhex sector based. But i cannot get any live cd running. VistaPE needs 256MB ram (at least the current WinBuilder v12 edition) and i tried LiveXP but don't know anymore why i dropped that. Maybe i preferred to create a XPe bootable at that time.

Another attempt would be an 2.5"->3.5" HDD adapter to connect the hdd directly to another system but i would prefer to not use that method.

Any idea why the cd doesn't boot? Is it possible that the notebook is not capable of booting El-Torito or the specific XPe format?



Btw, when the cd boots up on another system you can hear heavy sequential accesses. The laser jumps very often like a real HDD would do probably. Is there a caching component like 'smartdrive' or something available to improve cd-rom reading?
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