Chapter Three

Booting up WinXP System Disk Image File & Hard Disk Connection

Booting up WinXP System Disk Image File

3.1 After performing the steps in Chapter One and Chapter Two, on rebooting, user can come to the above two screens and select the items as highlighted for booting up and running WinXP on a virtual system memory disk created from a WinXP system disk image file.

The first screen on Page 1 above is created by ntldr bringing up the initial boot-up screen represented by boot.ini created on hard disk as described on Page 20 in Chapter One. By selecting the third entry, user can load up grldr, which brings up its boot-up screen, the second screen on Page 2 in this Chapter, represented by MENU.LST created as described on Page 24 in Chapter One.

By selecting the second entry on this grldr boot-up screen, user causes grldr to execute commands represented by this second entry. In essence, grldr loads up the WinXP system disk image file, C:\850ms.gz, created in Chapter Two and forms from it a Real Mode virtual memory disk.

As this virtual memory disk now contains the WinXP system image, when grldr next executes commands to load up the ntldr file within the compressed NTFS volume inside the virtual memory disk, the ntldr file takes up control of the subsequent booting process. The ntldr file reads the modified boot.ini file inside the virtual memory disk as described on Page 20 and Page 21 in Chapter Two and executes the instruction inside boot.ini, starting to run up the WinXP system image on the compressed NTFS volume inside the virtual memory disk, now managed by Diskless Angel Virtual SCSI Controller under Protected Mode.

After booting up, the virtual memory disk managed by Diskless Angel Virtual SCSI Controller under Protected Mode will be considered a piece of newly found hardware device as reported by WinXP. It will display the following screen asking for restarting the computer or not. User should say No to this prompting screen:

There is a file, \WINDOWS\system32\newdev.dll , in the system drive which controls the above prompting screen. If this prompting screen is not welcome, user can make it disappear by either deleting or renaming this file in the system image before booting it.

This however may make using new hardware undetected later. To re-activate this function, user may opt to add back this file or rename it to its original name later before new hardware is to be connected for use.

The above screen shows that after WinXP boots from the virtual memory system disk, under Windows Explorer, the virtual memory disk containing the WinXP system image now becomes F: drive. The two partitions of the hard disk are represented by C: drive and D: drive.

C: drive and D: drive however cannot be disconnected under this configuration. To be able to disconnect the hard disk, one can try to test out more configurations and see which configuration is the best for disconnecting the hard disk. In this example, other configurations are tried out by modifying the MENU.LST used by grldr. A consolidated MENU.LST containing entries or titles discussed in this example is available for download at http://www.disklessangel.com

These configurations for testing for disconnecting the hard disk can be:

(a) unhide or leave the two hard disk partitions as visible – as mentioned above, disconnection of hard disk is not possible under this configuration in this example

(b) hide the first hard disk partition

(c) hide the second hard disk partition

(d) hide all two hard disk partitions

It is found that hiding all two hard disk partitions in this example makes the computer hang on booting WinXP from virtual memory disk. A modified MENU.LST for achieving, amongst others, the configurations of (a), (b) and (c) is shown below:

This first title or entry shows that configuration of booting up the virtual system memory disk with both hard disk partitions remaining visible. The virtual system memory disk becomes F: drive as shown above.

When user selects the second title or entry, that is, to hide the first hard disk partition, the original C: drive, the virtual system memory disk takes its place and appears as C: drive on booting up. This is shown on the following screen on Page 8.

Under this configuration, in this example, it is again found that the hard disk cannot be disconnected, making diskless running of WinXP on this computer impossible.

When user selects the third title or entry, that is, to hide the second hard disk partition, the original D: drive, the virtual system memory disk takes its place and appears as D: drive on booting up. This is shown on the screen on Page 9.

With this configuration, the hard disk however can be disconnected and re-connected easily, making diskless running of WinXP on this computer and recycling it from diskly state to diskless state and vice versa possible.