Deploy Win2k3 using Scripting Toolkit Linux Edition?

[AlexF]

Hi all,

been a while since I've messed with the STK...and back then (~2+ years) everything was DOS. WinPE is a &#@%& to get a hold of so I figure Linux is the way to go. I've got everything working up to the point of creating the fat partition to drop the Win install files. The sample script install_win.sh has a couple of lines where ntldr.bss and ntldr2.bss are referenced. With the number of mistakes i found in these scripts i'm not sure if these are mistakes or if there are actually supposed to be two .bss files....regardless, the STK comes with one...freedos.bss. What am I missing, i'm sure it's something trivial.

Thanks!!

[Chris Davenport]

The .bss files are boot sectors. freedos.bss is the FreeDOS boot sector that can be used to create a DOS bootable filesystem.

ntldr.bss and ntldr2.bss are the boot sectors used to perform NTLDR boots on a fat32 filesystem.

They're not included in the toolkit because they belong to Microsoft. HP Includes a linux utility, "bootextract", that can extract those two boot sectors from ufat.dll, which you'll have to copy from Windows media or a running system.

What other issues have you found? I'd like to get those addressed.

[AlexF]

Ah-hah...very helpful info. All I'm trying to do is boot to DOS and kick off winnt.exe - in that case i would not require NTLDR, right? So using freedos.bss should be sufficient. I'll see if I can't make that work.

Thanks for your help.

[AlexF]

got the ntldr and ntldr2 in there...now i'm getting an illegal OpCode error. What else could i be missing?

[AlexF]

So, i'm stuck at the red screen of death...Any insight on this??

[Chris Davenport]

I'm not sure where the illegal OP code is coming from, though it could be from a mistake in the boot sector.

The script has a line to correct the number of hidden sectors set by mkdosfs, the line starts with "echo -ne "\400" | dd". That line is setting the number of hidden sectors to 32, which is correct for most systems, but not all. Some systems report/use 64 sectors per track. DL380G4 w/ a P600 controller has that issue.

I've also seen times when the hidden sectors are incorrect because sfdisk uses the existing partition information in the mbr when creating the new one. Add a sfdisk command to clear the partitions to work around that.

When the # of hidden sectors is incorrect, the boot code cannot find the filesystem. It usually leaves you at a black screen, but could cause other issues.

Using the NTLDR method requires a precise configuration of the filesystem, even if all the boot sectors are correct, it's really not well documented.

Basically if you start a CD based install, then stop the install at the first reboot, copy all those files off. Those are what you'll need to make the NTLDR method work.

After the script has prepared the partition, formatted it, made it bootable, copy those files down.

I really recommend sticking with the FreeDOS method.