How to make a Windows boot CD for A31

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Paul Pennington · #1 Post by **Paul Pennington** » Fri Sep 12, 2008 11:01 am

I recently painted myself into a corner while restoring some backups and needed a way to boot Windows from a CD to do some troubleshooting.

I've seen references to a "Bart's PE" disk for this purpose, but I don't see how to make one with what I have. It requires a Windows installation disk to create the CD from -- the IBM recovery disks won't work for this as the .cab files are not accessible. Going out and buying another copy of XP is not acceptable! (Note that Bart needs the installation files from the cabinets, not the resulting files on my hard disk now.)

Has anyone figured out how to make a boot CD for an A31?

Feel free to think outside the box and come up with another method, such as a USB drive.

Does IBM already have some kind of a troubleshooting CD that will accomplish this?

--Paul

PS: I'm running XP Pro SP3.

(Note to Moderators: I considered the Windows area for this but ThinkPads have such wildly different hardware that I decided it made more sense to discuss it here.)

Neil · #2 Post by **Neil** » Fri Sep 12, 2008 12:51 pm

As you have already found, it can be done with Windows, but it's not easy. However, a linux live CD is extremely easy to make and use. Most any of them will work to boot a machine from the CD so you can save, move, edit, etc. your files that are on the hard drive. I like Puppy and DSL, and have used Xubuntu as well. Download one of them (it's free), burn the iso to a CD, and boot.

Paul Pennington · #3 Post by **Paul Pennington** » Fri Sep 12, 2008 3:57 pm

In this particular case, linux would not help me as the utilities I need to run are for Windows. In general, once the CD booted up I wouldn't know what to do. I know zero about linux.

Thanks for trying to help, however.

#4 Post by **Harryc** » Fri Sep 12, 2008 4:10 pm

Aside from booting into windows, what are you trying to accomplish? In other words, what are the symptoms or errors that you are trying to fix? Machine freezes on boot? Boots to an error code? Was the backup recovery successful? What tools were you using? At what point did it fail and what did you see? Are you trying to repair windows or just get files off of the machine?

Paul Pennington · #5 Post by **Paul Pennington** » Fri Sep 12, 2008 9:30 pm

Harryc wrote:Aside from booting into windows, what are you trying to accomplish? In other words, what are the symptoms or errors that you are trying to fix? Machine freezes on boot? Boots to an error code? Was the backup recovery successful? What tools were you using? At what point did it fail and what did you see? Are you trying to repair windows or just get files off of the machine?

I was upgrading the hard disk in my wife's A31 from a 5400 to a 7200 RPM, both 60 GB. I used the disk copy function in Drive Image 7 to clone the original hard disk to the new drive in an untrabay adapter. That ran without errors. I then swapped the new drive into the internal hard disk bay.

At startup, the message "Operating System not found" appeared immediately in large white letters on a black background. I would guess the message is from the BIOS. I then swapped the original drive back in, but got the same message on startup.

Googling led to an article on the Lenovo site that indicated old versions of Norton Ghost would write a 1-sector master boot record to newer systems that used a 4-sector mbr. I also found a utility called MbrFix that would write a new mbr, but only it runs under Windows. I had no way to boot Windows to execute the utility program.

As it turned out, I discovered a USB drive had been inserted in one of the ports on the back. The system was trying to boot from that, hence the error message. I removed the USB drive and everything worked.

Having wasted a day trying to get around the problem, I feel that I should have a tool available to boot Windows in case of future need.

--Paul

Neil · #6 Post by **Neil** » Sat Sep 13, 2008 8:08 am

Ultimate Boot CD. It won't boot Windows, but it will give you more diagnostic tools and repair utilities than you would have in Windows anyway. Very handy to have around.

Or, Ultimate Boot CD for Windows. I've never tried this one, but it may be more to your taste.

Paul Pennington · #7 Post by **Paul Pennington** » Sat Sep 13, 2008 10:58 am

Thanks, Neil.

Ultimate Boot CD for Windows looks interesting. It's based on Bart's PE, but the documentation appears to be much better and there is a user forum where the author is the most active poster. It even includes the mbrfix utility I was trying to use. I guess I'll have to look around for a XP CD.

I'd be interested in hearing from anyone who has run the Ultimate Boot CD for Windows on a ThinkPad.

--Paul

Paul Pennington · #8 Post by **Paul Pennington** » Wed Sep 17, 2008 2:19 pm

It was an all-day project, but I got the Ultimate Boot CD for Windows working.

I scrounged a XP CD, and slipstreamed SP3 into it using Autostreamer (links and instructions on the UBCD4Win site). That's a handy thing to have around for saving time loading XP. Doesn't help with the ThinkPad recovery cd's, unfortunately.

The UBCD4Win program took quite a while to build the .iso image from the download and my XP CD. Worked first time, however. Kinda ugly, but readable. I probably need to load some drivers, but it works, so I'll stop fixing it. Burned the image with Nero, and it boots up (slowly) on my A31 and T23. I even tried it on my 380XD (266 MHz Pentium-II with 160 MB memory -- worked fine.

I'd be glad to help if anyone has questions about the procedure to make your own.

Derek B. Cornish · #9 Post by **Derek B. Cornish** » Sun Sep 21, 2008 8:40 am

Paul Pennington wrote: Googling led to an article on the Lenovo site that indicated old versions of Norton Ghost would write a 1-sector master boot record to newer systems that used a 4-sector mbr. I also found a utility called MbrFix that would write a new mbr, but only it runs under Windows. I had no way to boot Windows to execute the utility program.
--Paul

Do you happen to have the URL for the Lenovo article? I'm about to upgrade my HDD from 40GB to 120GB using Ghost v9, and wondered whether I might run into some problems with that version. I also seem to remember reading somewhere that older versions of PartitionMagic may not work with larger HDDs.

I know this turned out NOT to be your problem, but any info helps

.

Derek

Paul Pennington · #10 Post by **Paul Pennington** » Sun Sep 21, 2008 10:46 am

I should have included the URL with my message. Here it is:

http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site. ... MIGR-57590

--Paul

#11 Post by **Harryc** » Sun Sep 21, 2008 11:41 am

As a side note, Acronis True Image averts the boot sector problems if you create a drive image using the sector by sector method. This is selected from one of the screens during the image process.

Derek B. Cornish · #12 Post by **Derek B. Cornish** » Sun Sep 21, 2008 2:02 pm

Paul Pennington wrote:I should have included the URL with my message. Here it is:

http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site. ... MIGR-57590

--Paul

Thanks, Paul (and HarryC). I'm about to upgrade my A31's hard disk again. Last time I did this I cloned from 30GB to 40GB and used the latter as my backup drive until I switched it from my Ultrabay into the main HDD bay. Ghost didn't give me any trouble that time, but it's best to be prepared for the worst...

Derek

How to make a Windows boot CD for A31

How to make a Windows boot CD for A31

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