PLoP & GRUB4DOS problem

[Logis1]

Hello Everyone,

There's a little bit of background to the problem so if you just bear with me and i'll try and describe it as best as I can.

I am using a bootable USB stick which loads GRUB4DOS and then from that loads a BartPE ISO into a RAMDISK and boots from that.

This usually works fine except for quite a lot of our machines have USB 2.0 ports but the BIOS only uses them at USB 1.1 speeds, this makes loading the BartPE image quite slow.

I was hoping that PLoP would be able to bypass that little problem and so I have added a PLoP loader into the GRUB4DOS menu so that it will load that up and then get PLoP to reboot from the USB stick again.

BIOS -> USB -> GRUB4DOS -> PLoP -> USB -> GRUB4DOS -> BartPE

Now this all works fine when I am using the patched NTLDR and the Server 2K3 ramdisk.sys method to boot BartPE from RAMDisk but I'd rather not use this as I wish to have several BartPE disks on there to load and this requires me to edit the NTLDR and have several copies on the USB stick to boot the different versions.

So there's another method that requires having a BartPE disk with a driver inbuilt that supports the GRUB4DOS RamDrive and then rather than using NTLDR it can boot directly from the ISO image.

This also works fine without PLoP but again is limited to the slow USB 1.1 BIOS speeds.  This is where the problem comes in.  When I add PLoP into the mix the NTLDR method works fine and it boots up at the faster speeds :-)  but when using the preferred driver method to boot PLoP still loads and is running at the faster speeds, it loads into the ramdrive fine and when I chainload it and start to boot it just locks up the machine.

Now I have tried it using the PLoP from floppy in case double booting from USB was the issue but no cigar and I have tried it by uncompressing the ISO images as GRUB lets you load them as Gzipped compressed but still crashes in the same place.

So now i'm stuck for ideas.

I have tested it on several machines, all of them the Dell Optiplex series but different models as these are the machines we use.

GX240 - Only USB1.1 and no BIOS support for USB booting.  NTLDR method fine, other method reboots the machine.

GX260 - USB 2.0 ports, BIOS support. NTLDR fine, other method locks up the machine.

GX270 - USB 2.0 ports, BIOS support. NTLDR fine, other method locks up the machine.

I have also tried it on a HP d230 MT, this also has USB2.0 ports and BIOS support but still loads at 1.1 speeds.  Both NTLDR and the other method work fine on this.  So it does appear to be a problem with the OptiPlex series but any ideas of things I could try would be welcome.

Thanks,

Logis

[Icecube]

I guess you are using the Firadisk driver.
You can try the WinVBlock driver instead (supports grub4dos memory mapped and MEMDISK mapped drives):
http://www.boot-land.net/forums/index.php?showtopic=8168

Get MEMDISK from Syslinux 3.85 (or later):

Code Select Expand

title BartPE
kernel /memdisk raw iso
initrd bartpe.iso

[Icecube]

You can detect if PloP is already loaded, and prevent booting it twice.
http://forum.plop.at/index.php/topic,165.0.html

[Logis1]

Thanks for the reply Icecube.

Yes I am using the firadisk driver, is this a known problem with this driver and PLoP as I couldn't find anything about it?

I shall give the WinVBlock driver a go, if I test it both using both memdisk and grub4dos ramdisks I shall be able to isolate the exact problem hopefully.

I'll keep you all updated.

[Logis1]

Right i've had another blast at it.

I've redone the BartPE disk with the WinVBlock driver present and removed the Firadisk driver but I can't for the life of me get it to boot into BartPE always get the BSoD with the 7B stop error.  Do I have to add something other than just the WinVBlock driver?  The examples on the link seem to say just add and load as normal.

This is with WinVBlock 0.0.1.6 and Memdisk 3.85.

Though on the positive side it does start loading with the memdisk ramdisk which it didn't do before so I can assume that if I can get WinVBlock working then it should work correctly

[Icecube]

Add "/WINVBLOCK=BUS=1" on the OsLoadOptions line in TXTSETUP.SIF.

[Logis1]

Woohoo!

That works a treat and now it all works as it should.  Thanks very much Icecube 

[Logis1]

Looks like I might have been wrong about it working okay after all :-(

It seems that BartPE blue screens with a 0x0000007E STOP error when I try and start the network configuration tool in BartPE, it only does this when the WinVBlock driver is installed.  Even if I haven't used the driver to load up a ramdrive.

It might be related to the Intel networks drivers as well as it won't crash if the network drivers are not included but then I cannot start the network anyway so it's a bit hard to tell if it's related to it or not.

It doesn't do it if I use the firadisk driver (with or without intel network drivers) and then it loads the network fine but of course I cannot use the firadisk driver with PLoP for the USB 2.0 speeds as it cannot load MEMDISK based ramdrives and it doesn't work with the GRUB4DOS -mem command.

So in a nutshell :-

Firadisk - Works with network but doesn't work with PLoP when using GRUB4DOS ramdrives
WinVBlock - BSoD when using network but can work with PLoP via memdisk ramdrives.

Any further ideas to get everything working??  I have tried different versions of the Intel network drivers but still the same.