[victor888]

Quote

You meant SetupSourceDevice = \device\harddisk0\partition1, right? What was SetupSourcePath?

Yes, you are right.
SeupSourcePath, I did not change it.

You get up so ealier.

[ilko_t]

Quote

SeupSourcePath, I did not change it.

I'd try with a source in a folder too.

Quote

You get up so ealier.

Nah, just the time zone. As for waking up early mornings- that's never been my strong side

[jaclaz]

I may add that however, grub4dos dd should be able to change a single byte even on a NTFS filesystem with no problems, haven't tested it, but from the grub4dos readme:

Quote

In some cases when writing a file in NTFS, dd might fail.

should mean that it is possible that a problem happens, not necessarily that it will happen.

The difficult part would be to tell it WHICH byte to change, i.e. somehow scripting the feature, both finding the "address" that needs to be changed and the right "value" to write.

The "z-1" concept was devised to work on "ANY" setup :
http://www.msfn.org/board/How-to-boot-inst...html&st=240
and following.


jaclaz

[victor888]

Here already such dd example in Chinese: http://bbs.znpc.net/viewthread.php?tid=550...t=dd&page=4

The 60th topic.

I translate here

Quote

dd is a strong command, personally I think this is anoter most powerfull command after map command of grub4dos.

By using the switch of "bs, skip, seek" we can copy file to file, sector to sector and the byte to byte of file, any position can be wittern (wether the file is read only or have NTFS right, Added by victor888).

Note:
1. for a complete write, the byte of target file must be more than or equal to source file.
2. The target file should be in device, no matter what the file content is.

Example:

This is a dos batch on (fd0) name path.bat:

set string=abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz
set path=￥：
goto main
:main
...
...
....
goto end
...
:end

The first line is 37 bytes (in fact, there ENTER or SHIFTLINE charactor bytes at the end of line, for the sake of demonstrating the use of dd command, the bytes are omitted.)
The second line is 11 bytes.

Then we could write any charactor to the second line.
e.x replacy ￥ in the second line to certain letter, juse do the following:

dd if=(fd0)/path.bat of=(fd0)/path.bat bs=1 skip=11 count=1 seek=46

hence, the second line was replace to set path=a:

（bs=1 means one byte as read unite，count=1 means only write one block defined by bs switch, here is one byte. skip=11 means skip 11 bytes including space. seek=46 means skip 46 bytes when write, that is write the 47 byte ￥）

Certainly, we can do booting disk this way:
dd if=/pe.img of=(fd0) or
dd if=(cd0) of=/cd.iso

Writing boot sector to imge fiel is also convenient:
dd if=(hd0,0)+1 of=/dos.img

We can study above to chang boot.ini without dificculty.

This post has been edited by victor888: 16 March 2009 - 08:51 AM

[jaclaz]

victor888, on Mar 16 2009, 03:49 PM, said:

We can study above to chang boot.ini without dificculty.

Well, not so easy.

I have full faith on the power of grub4dos dd command, but alas not yet enough on grub4dos scripting language.

You may have a "strange" BOOT.INI already on the target machine.

See the example posted here:
http://www.msfn.org/board/How-to-boot-inst...html&st=244

Are you positive that you can find a way (entirely in grub4dos) to detect the position of z, both here:

Quote

[Boot Loader]
Timeout=5
Default=multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(z)partition(3)\WINDOWS

and here:

Quote

...
....
C:\BOOT\FDOS1440.bin="Test boot"
multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(z)partition(3)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /fastdetect

And later read the z value, calculate the z-1 value and write it in both places?


jaclaz

[victor888]

You give a special example which is difficult to deal with.
For fresh instll xp on a new partition, boot.ini is simple and easy to revise by grldr.

[jaclaz]

victor888, on Mar 17 2009, 05:12 AM, said:

You give a special example which is difficult to deal with.
For fresh instll xp on a new partition, boot.ini is simple and easy to revise by grldr.

Yep.

But it would be a little limitative, as I see it, being comaptible ONLY with a newly formatted drive and with ONLY one NT/2K/XP/2003 and no multibooting.

jaclaz

[mawi]

I am testing your method.

I am curious about what is to be renamed in TXTSETUP.SIF - i386. Is this what is supposed to be renamed?

[SourceDisksNames.x86]
1 = %cdname%,%cdtagfilei%,,"\$WIN_NT$.~BT"
2 = %cd2name%,%cd2tagfilei%,,"\cmpnents\tabletpc\$WIN_NT$.~BT"
3 = %cd2name%,%cd2tagfilei%,,"\cmpnents\mediactr\$WIN_NT$.~BT"
4 = %cd2name%,%cd2tagfilei%,,"\cmpnents\netfx\$WIN_NT$.~BT"
100 = %spcdname%,%spcdtagfilei%,,"\$WIN_NT$.~BT",1
_1 = %bootname1%,%boottagfile1%,,""
_2 = %bootname2%,%boottagfile2%,,""
_3 = %bootname3%,%boottagfile3%,,""
_4 = %bootname4%,%boottagfile4%,,""
_5 = %bootname5%,%boottagfile5%,,""
_6 = %bootname6%,%boottagfile6%,,""
1_ = %bootname1%,%boottagfile1%,,""
2_ = %bootname2%,%boottagfile2%,,""
3_ = %bootname3%,%boottagfile3%,,""
4_ = %bootname4%,%boottagfile4%,,""
5_ = %bootname5%,%boottagfile5%,,""
6_ = %bootname6%,%boottagfile6%,,""
7 = %cdname%,%cdtagfilei%,,"\$WIN_NT$.~BT\lang"
107 = %spcdname%,%spcdtagfilei%,,"\$WIN_NT$.~BT\lang",1
8 = %cdname%,%cdtagfilei%,,"\$WIN_NT$.~BT\lang"
9 = %cdname%,%cdtagfilei%,,"\$WIN_NT$.~BT\lang"
10 = %cdname%,%cdtagfilei%,,"\$WIN_NT$.~BT\lang"
11 = %cdname%,%cdtagfilei%,,"\$WIN_NT$.~BT"
12 = %cdname%,%cdtagfilei%,,"\$WIN_NT$.~BT"
13 = %cdname%,%cdtagfilei%,,"\$WIN_NT$.~BT"
14 = %cdname%,%cdtagfilei%,,"\$WIN_NT$.~BT"
15 = %cdname%,%cdtagfilei%,,"\$WIN_NT$.~BT"

[mawi]

I've tried a couple of times, and I can't get it to work correctly.

Regardless of what I do, I get a boot error message after reboot after initial (textmode, the grey on blue) install phase.

Depending on BIOS I get:

* USB drive highest prio. Textmode install lists hard drive as C.
* USB drive lower prio, use F12 to manually select USB to boot from. Textmode install lists hard drive as E or something.

One thing, I am using

SetupSourceDevice = \device\harddisk1\partition1

I am not sure how things are related here, so if that affects anything.

/mawi

[aviv00]

in [winnt] subject u have i386 folder too that should be unrenamed

[mawi]

aviv00, on Mar 19 2009, 03:07 PM, said:

in [winnt] subject u have i386 folder too that should be unrenamed

Hmm, do you mean [winntdirectories]? I can't find a [winnt] section.

Winntdirectories has one occurence of i386:

[WinntDirectories]
1980 = PCHealth\HelpCtr\Binaries
1 = "\"
2 = system32
3 = "system32\config"
4 = "system32\drivers"
...
39 = "Driver Cache\i386"
40 = security
...

[aviv00]

yep only them

[mawi]

aviv00, on Mar 19 2009, 07:55 PM, said:

yep only them

OK, I have changed from the above to this (only one line, the one with 40 at the beginning):

[WinntDirectories]
1980 = PCHealth\HelpCtr\Binaries
1 = "\"
2 = system32
3 = "system32\config"
4 = "system32\drivers"
...
39 = "Driver Cache\$WIN_NT$.~BT"
40 = security
...

I also discovered that I must use harddisk1, as you mentioned:

[SetupData]
SetupSourceDevice = \device\harddisk1\partition1
SetupSourcePath = "\"

So, as a side note, if I try SetupSourceDevice with harddisk0, it tells me "No previous version of Windows NT can be found..." [press F3], like so:
 NoPreviousVersion.JPG (18.7K)
Number of downloads: 12


I have two problems that I will see if I can solve now:

(1) Reboot after "blue"/text phase doesn't continue install
(2) I get (E:) as letter for the harddrive

/mawi

This post has been edited by mawi: 19 March 2009 - 01:30 PM

[mawi]

mawi, on Mar 19 2009, 08:02 PM, said:

I have two problems that I will see if I can solve now:

(1) Reboot after "blue"/text phase doesn't continue install
(2) I get (E:) as letter for the harddrive

So, here I continue.

Problem (2) above depends on my own doing:
- I have two partitions on the harddrive, and
- as I repartitioned and reformatted the first - so I could retry installing - the second partition got assigned letter C: and the first partition got E:, for some reason. Bah.


But problem (1) is left. What happens is this:

* Boot from USB goes fine, I use F12 to temporarily select USB
* The first part of setup (blue, text phase) goes nicely.
* I reboot after partitioning and the copying is done, then:

* I think it tries to boot from harddrive, but it doesn't seem to work, for some reason.

I get the following screen with the text starting with
"Windows could not start because of a computer disk hardware configuration problem.
Could not read from the seleected boot disk. Check boiot path and disk hardware.
Please check the windows documentation about hardware..."

 DiskHardConfigProblem.jpg (23.85K)
Number of downloads: 10



What could the problem be?
What can I do about it?
Have I missed some step?


Thanks for your replies and your time!

/mawi

[ilko_t]

mawi, on Mar 19 2009, 11:38 AM, said:

I get the following screen with the text starting with
"Windows could not start because of a computer disk hardware configuration problem.
Could not read from the seleected boot disk. Check boiot path and disk hardware.
Please check the windows documentation about hardware..."

Wrong rdisk value in boot.ini on the internal disk...

[mawi]

OK, so I used a PE boot disk (on another, small USB disk) to check what was on the harddrive, and it had accumulated different installs.

After erasing, I decided to clear all partitions and start from scratch.

After first phase (blue/text mode) reboot, I then get a new error message:

"Windows could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt:
<Windows root>\system32\hal.dll
Please reinstall a copy of the file."

 HalDllMissing.jpg (19.58K)
Number of downloads: 4

I have tried this twice now, and I get the same error message.


It seems that I may have missed some edit in TXTSETUP.SIF?
If so, what?


Thanks again!

/mawi

PS
Here is my complete TXTSETUP.SIF:
 TXTSETUP.zip (74.65K)
Number of downloads: 9

This post has been edited by mawi: 19 March 2009 - 02:11 PM

[ilko_t]

This one should be because of wrong partition(X) value in boot.ini. Did you start from USB the second time? Does partition number in boot.ini match the partition number you installed to?
Do rdisk values in boot.ini on the internal hard disk match?

Since you can boot from PE disk you should post the relevant information, this would save both parties time.

In other hand- what are you trying to accomplish? Need one-off install or you are willing to experiment?

[mawi]

ilko_t, on Mar 19 2009, 09:29 PM, said:

This one should be because of wrong partition(X) value in boot.ini. Did you start from USB the second time? Does partition number in boot.ini match the partition number you installed to?

After reboot, I try to boot from hard drive.
That is how I interpreted the instructions. Should I start from USB disk the second time?
I am assuming for this procedure, that I should not, is that false?

About boot.ini: I don't know, right now I just have one partition on the harddrive, so it should work, I guess...

ilko_t, on Mar 19 2009, 09:29 PM, said:

Do rdisk values in boot.ini on the internal hard disk match?

How do I check this, these so called rdisk values - boot.ini on hard drive or USB drive? Do I match that against values in some other file?

ilko_t, on Mar 19 2009, 09:29 PM, said:

Since you can boot from PE disk you should post the relevant information, this would save both parties time.

In other hand- what are you trying to accomplish? Need one-off install or you are willing to experiment?

I would like to get this install to work. I dont have access to CD right now. I have tried many methods, this one seems to be close.

It would be nice to not have to experiment. But like one poster said, many instructions are complicated or large. I have tried the GUI, but I didn't get it to work either, I posted about the 16 bit CONFIG.NT problem. Maybe I will retry using it.


Again, thanks for all your help and time.

/mawi

[ilko_t]

Quote

How do I check this, these so called rdisk values - boot.ini on hard drive or USB drive? Do I match that against values in some other file?

From PE disk, boot.ini on the hard drive. When you open it there are 2 lines with rdisk in it. Both values should be the same.

Quote

It would be nice to not have to experiment.

Well, you have hit a thread with a method, which is relatively new and barely tested. Unless you have the time and willingness to experiment I'd suggest you to stay with the proven to work and well tested methods:

http://www.msfn.org/...howtopic=111406
http://www.msfn.org/...howtopic=120444
http://www.msfn.org/...howtopic=121446

Using (heavily) modified sources makes the things trickier, but I do not remember a case in this subforum, which has not been resolved.

Setup started by WINNT.EXE from DOS and WINNT32.EXE from PE environment are always an option too.

Quote

I posted about the 16 bit CONFIG.NT problem

And you got reply. Rebuilding the USB disk in order to gather the required information would have not costed you much time, would it? I guess not more than 10-15 minutes with USB hard drive formatted in NTFS.

[mawi]

ilko_t, on Mar 19 2009, 11:40 PM, said:

Quote

How do I check this, these so called rdisk values - boot.ini on hard drive or USB drive? Do I match that against values in some other file?

From PE disk, boot.ini on the hard drive. When you open it there are 2 lines with rdisk in it. Both values should be the same.

I'll check this as soon as I get time (which sadly means tomorrow). Could this really be the culprit for the hal.dll not found problem?

ilko_t, on Mar 19 2009, 11:40 PM, said:

Quote

It would be nice to not have to experiment.

Well, you have hit a thread with a method, which is relatively new and barely tested.

I do realize that this is newer. I meant that I would have preferred to not have to experiment. The reason for trying this method is simply that the others I tried did not work.

ilko_t, on Mar 19 2009, 11:40 PM, said:

Unless you have the time and willingness to experiment I'd suggest you to stay with the proven to work and well tested methods:

The one proven that I tried didn't work in my situation.

I don't know which of these are more proven than the next. It may be obvious, to you, that one is better than another, but as one new here, looking for a solution, it is really not that obvious.

One proven would be easy to get started with. These first and last look experimental to me. I tried the GUI one, second link.

ilko_t, on Mar 19 2009, 11:40 PM, said:

http://www.msfn.org/...howtopic=111406
http://www.msfn.org/...howtopic=120444
http://www.msfn.org/...howtopic=121446

ilko_t, on Mar 19 2009, 11:40 PM, said:

Using (heavily) modified sources makes the things trickier, but I do not remember a case in this subforum, which has not been resolved.

The only modification I have is added driver, without which setup wont recognize my disks. I never doubted anyones ability or good intentions. I am sure the answer is out there, somewhere.

ilko_t, on Mar 19 2009, 11:40 PM, said:

Setup started by WINNT.EXE from DOS and WINNT32.EXE from PE environment are always an option too.

I tried this but I made some mistake and didn't get far.

ilko_t, on Mar 19 2009, 11:40 PM, said:

Quote

I posted about the 16 bit CONFIG.NT problem

And you got reply.

Yes I got a reply, I never said I did not. I'm merely answering your question, explaining where I ran into a snag.

ilko_t, on Mar 19 2009, 11:40 PM, said:

Rebuilding the USB disk in order to gather the required information would have not costed you much time, would it?

Hmm, what is the point of this? (Shall I say: "Oh, I did wrong. I repent, I am sorry. I will not ask anymore questions." ? Silly.) I am trying the best I can, I hope you see that.


I will retry, tomorrow!

Again, I do appreciate your and everyone elses help and time. And I understand that you must get frustrated at times! I sure do.


/mawi