USB stick device, made under Win 7, trying to boot a Dell Optiplex 780

Hello

Sorry the attachment was done incorrectly, here goes with a replay:

Attachment 398159

Hopefully this is an image that is not affected by bork - what is the past participle of bork - it could be bark or even berk.

FYI, the USB stick was formatted using diskpart, as part of the preparation for putting WinPE on it. I was following the walk through in Karp's Win 7 Annoyances book (page 18), and the WinPE creation walk through that is in the WAIK documentation.

dg1261's helpful observation (and new information to me) is that the booting process is getting past the MBR, but failing in the PBR because I am getting an error message 'bootmgr is missing'. I think he/she means control is passed to the PBR, but either this is corrupt (call to bootmgr gives the wrong location) or bootmgr is in the wrong place in the directory structure and cannot be executed.

That is why I included the PBR and the directory structure in the borked reply.

I am sure SIW2 is correct in stating that any modern partition manager will write the correct code. Unfortunately, my experience to date is that somewhere in the process something is going wrong. This may be me, but the only thing I can do is give as full a feedback as possible, including unborked attachments, and hope that the more knowledgeable of you will have the patience to explain where the errors are.

Thanks for letting me know about the borking, SIW2.

Any comments now you can see the full picture.

Kind regards
JohnPat

There should be a deborked image below. Please read in conjunction with my two previous replies.



Kind regards
JohnPat

JohnPat said:

How does this entry come to use the extensionless file 'bootmgr' which is located in the ISO directory of the USB stick?

The directory structure on the USB stick was prepared on the 'technician' machine. and is as follows:

G:\ISO

...\boot
......\fonts
.........(5 .ttf files)
......bcd
......boot.sdi
......bootfix.bin
......etfsboot.com

...\EFI
......\microsoft
.........\boot
............\fonts
...............(same 5 .ttf files as earlier)
............bcd

...\sources
......boot.wim [Note this file is the same as winpe.wim generated in the WAIK, copied to the USB
root and then copied again to sources and renamed boot.wim, in accordance with
instructions]
...bootmgr

Just for clarification, you didn't put everything in a folder called "ISO" on your flash drive, did you? That's kind of the way your Reply #19 reads. It's supposed to all be in the root directory.

Hello SIW2.

The USB was prepared on the technician computer (Win 7 32 bit with SP1).

From the elevated command prompt, diskpart was entered and the usual command stream given, namely:

list disk {Note 'disk' number corresponding to the USB as diskk n}
select disk n
clean
create partition primary
list partition {Check there is only one partition}
select partition 1
active
format fs=fat32 {Both long and short formating commands have been tried}
assign
exit

At the command prompt, I then run:

d:\boot\bootsect.exe /nt60 k: {d: is the DVD contains the system disk, and k: is the USB stick}

Kind regards
JohnPat

Hello dg1261

The WAIK script copype.cmd creates the directory structure I gave in my earlier reply. The relevant parts of the WAIK documentation are:

Attachment 398174

I interpreted Step 3, item 4 as a need to recreate the directory structure of the build environment, that is to say the structure I gave in my previous reply, including completely all files, sub-directories and their files exactly as in the build environment. The step specifically refers to manual creation of the structure, or the use of XCOPY, to automatically create the structure on the USB, including the ISO directory with its structure and especially with the sources sub-directory containing boot.wim.

Are you suggesting that I just put only the contents of the ISO directory at the top level, or just all the files (as opposed to files, sub-directories and their files) at the top level? I really do not understand the logic here, because bootmgr is, in any case, at the top level of the ISO directory.

It seems to me the documentation could perhaps be a little clearer here, but then I'm not proficient at reading MS documentation at this level. If it is so critical an example of the 'finished product' as it is on the USB would be really helpful.

Thanks again for your comments.

Kind regards
JohnPat

PS I've just previewed the file and the .txt attachment is, as SIW2 would put it, borked. I need to find out why, the machine I am working on only has Open Office, but Ihave saved it from there in .txt format.

JohnPat said:

Are you suggesting that I just put only the contents of the ISO directory at the top level, or just all the files (as opposed to files, sub-directories and their files) at the top level? I really do not understand the logic here, because bootmgr is, in any case, at the top level of the ISO directory.

Again, I haven't done what you're doing, but I can't imagine you're supposed to include the ISO directory. Normally, just the *contents* of the ISO folder would be transferred to the flash drive, with any subdirectories as is.

IOW, when you take a look at your finished flash drive, bootmgr should be in your root directory. That's where the PBR is looking for it. If you've got it at \ISO\bootmgr, that would explain why the PBR isn't finding it and hence the "bootmgr not present" error msg. Likewise, the BCD should be at \boot\bcd, not at \ISO\boot\bcd.