[Bootstrap Bill]

Relative newbie to PE, please bear with me.

Problem: booting WinPE from the hard disk in a VM causes the VM to hang just after the WinXP logo is displayed, the screen just goes black and nothing more happens

Fact: booting from the same files from a CD works just fine!

Info: I built the WinPE from WinXP SP2 files, added the BusLogic/VMWare SCSI driver and altered the winpeoem.sif file. Then I created a copy of the directory I boot WinPE from, on the CD, so that I won't be copying from the files I booted on. I then boot on the CD (either physical CD or .ISO works just fine), and run diskpart to create a primary partition, activate it, and then format it. Then I copy all the WinPE files to the Minint directory, copy out the ntdetect.com and then setupldr.bin, renaming the latter to ntldr as per standard procedure. The next time I boot the system is on a Windows 98 startup floppy, so I can run fdisk /mbr. And then when I reboot again, after having disconnected the floppy and CD/ISO so that it must boot from hard disk, it starts up fine, goes through the text mode just fine, changes to graphical mode, displays the WinXP logo, goes black and hangs.

I have incidentally also tried what seems to be an older approach; installing the recovery console and then going through the above mentioned, but also copying txtsetup.sif to the cmdcons directory, I've tried copying the winbom.ini to the root of the disk, didn't help either.

Am I completely wrong in thinking that it can't be a driver problem since booting on exactly the same files from the CD works?

Details: VMWare Workstation v4.5.2, Windows PE 2004

Anyone able to shed any light on this?

regards, B.Bill

[prathapml]

Go to the VM properties and delete the SCSI hard-disc. Now add a HD of any size but keep it IDE. Now does it work?