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Booting XP from a local ISO

Question

I've been booting from local ISO's for years but I can never find instructions when I search for how to do it. Perhaps there are loads of these guides out there but just in case here is another.

First up so I can find this again.

 

Boot XP from local ISO

Boot from iso stored locally

Boot from c:\winpe.iso

 

There is nothing like the smell of dirty old batch files in the morning...

 

Extract the attached ZIP to C:\Temp\PELoaders

 

Copy your ISO file to C:\ and call it winpe.iso

NOTE: sadly this cannot be a PE3.0 iso as that just load a wim into memory and this process loads the iso into memory it just does not work

If you do get this working let me know (you see the prob, this loads an iso into RAM which loads a WIM into RAM... earlier PE's and lots of others (bart) work fine

 

You can run all this in Windows (I suggest a test machine incase you never manage to boot up again which is likely enough for a first go).

Run these commands in a CMD (while live in Windows XP, again TEST MACHINE!)

 

 

ATTRIB c:\ntldr -S -H -R

copy c:\ntldr c:\ntldr.OS

copy C:\Temp\PELoaders\ntldr.PE c:\ntldr

ATTRIB c:\NTDETECT.COM -S -H -R

copy c:\ntdetect.COM c:\ntdetect.OS

copy C:\Temp\PELoaders\ntdetect.PE c:\ntdetect.com

ATTRIB c:\winnt.sif -S -H -R

del c:\winnt.sif

copy C:\Temp\PELoaders\winnt.pe c:\winnt.sif

ATTRIB c:\ntldr +S +H +R

ATTRIB c:\NTDETECT.COM +S +H +R

 

That Winnt.sif is a pre confirgured file looking like this: (so you iso needs to be c:\winpe.iso or you can change this file to suite - only x86 tested)

 

[setupData]

BootDevice = "ramdisk(0)"

BootPath = "\i386\System32\"

OsLoadOptions = "/noguiboot /fastdetect /minint /rdexportascd /rdpath=winpe.iso"

Architecture = "i386"

 

If at this point you realise this is not a test PC and I want to go home you can set everything back to booting from XP (or you do this in XP having just booted there using this method) and run

 

ATTRIB c:\ntldr -S -H -R

ATTRIB c:\NTDETECT.COM -S -H -R

del c:\NTLDR

del c:\NTDETECT.COM

del c:\WINNT.SIF

REN C:\NTLDR.OS NTLDR

REN C:\NTDETECT.OS NTDETECT.COM

ATTRIB c:\ntldr +S +H +R

ATTRIB c:\NTDETECT.COM +S +H +R

 

The boot files are Windows 2003sp1 files. Note the websites below show how do download an eval copy and extract them.

 

Rebooting a remote machine to PE is useful. Add some tools like VNC server and you can then remote it and do AV scans, kick of deployments etc. Rebooting your own machine to PE locally is good to. This is part of our framework for 'Zero touch' for Windows XP. Now in Vista and 7 we can all boot from WIMS which is good when working with PE 3.0.

 

 

After searching for winnt.sif and ISO I found some posts on this (seems everyone does it differently by the process here has worked for me for ages -only not with WinPE 3.0-).

 

http://www.911cd.net/forums/index.php?showtopic=10445

http://www.911cd.net/forums/index.php?showtopic=10482

 

After seeing all the useful stuff from Anyweb it seemed time to try contribute something useful though this one might we widely known I can't find it myself. The ones above confuse me.

PELoaders.zip

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