Booting Windows (from HDD) out of DOS

[fstwlkr]

Hi all,

I have a specific PXE booting solution in mind but I'm missing a little bit of DOS knowledge to make it work. Here is the situation:

I want to have PXE as the first boot option in BIOS on my workstations; from PXE I boot WINPE which loads a menu script, giving you 3 options: Windows, linux and boot from hard drive. If you choose windows or linux, Ghost.exe is started with a parameter that either pushes a Windows or Linux image, depending on your choice.

If you choose 'boot from hard drive', it simply has to load the OS that is on the HDD (windows in most cases). However this means that I somehow have to insert a section in my DOS script that loads the OS from the hard drive and I have no idea how to do this; googling hasn't really helped so far.

Is there anyone that has experience with this and could point me in the right direction?

Thanks in advance!

[foxidrive]

I want to have PXE as the first boot option in BIOS on my workstations; from PXE I boot WINPE which loads a menu script, giving you 3 options: Windows, linux and boot from hard drive. If you choose windows or linux, Ghost.exe is started with a parameter that either pushes a Windows or Linux image, depending on your choice.

If you choose 'boot from hard drive', it simply has to load the OS that is on the HDD (windows in most cases). However this means that I somehow have to insert a section in my DOS script that loads the OS from the hard drive and I have no idea how to do this; googling hasn't really helped so far.

I don't have specific knowledge but it seems that for the last option you would do nothing at all and simply let the engine continue.

What happens when you use ghost to push a Win/Lin image? Does it reboot automatically at the end? If it does then what is in the batch file/command line that causes that? Nothing? If so would a batch file that just echos a word then cause the engine to boot the machine?

Code: Select all

@echo off
echo continuing...

[fstwlkr]

That is indeed one of the reasons why I want a way to boot from HDD.

The problem is that I need PXE to be the first boot option in BIOS (for other reasons, it has to be this way). What happens is that after I ghost a Windows or Linux image to the pc, after rebooting, it simply boots ghost from PXE again and the whole process starts again (so you get into a boot loop).

That's why I need to find a way to letter the user choose to boot from HDD, or have the script somehow know that it has just been ghosted and that it simply needs to boot from HDD. I have an idea of how to do that, except that I don't know how to boot from HDD from WINPE (so using DOS).

[Ed Dyreen]

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Hi fstwlkr,

Did you try msfn forums already, http://www.msfn.org/board/ , will you report back ?