Am I on the right track

[windy-maverick]

Hi there...I'm a total newbie to this type of application. I'm trying to determine an inexpensive means to run some imaging software. The issue I have is I can get the software loaded into Windows 2003 Server and take the image. However, if I want to restore the image, I need to be able to boot the server and load the image and I can't count on the O/S being there. No floppy, so I need to boot from the cd and then run the imaging software and hopefully be able to load the image from that point. Is UBCD the right selection? I downloaded it and burned the cd. I could boot a normal pc, but not my Dell PowerEdge. It seems to go right past the cd boot. I'm open to any ideas and opionions. Thanks in advance.

Mark

[Icecube]

You have to change the boot order in the BIOS. Press F1, DEL, ESC, F12, ... (look at the screen to see which key to press) when you boot the pc and navigate through the bios settings and look for a section where you can choose in which order the BIOS has to check if the drive is bootable. See that the CDROM drive is listed before the Hard drive.

If you have a recent BIOS you also can press F8 at boot and select the right CDROM drive . This approach is easier.

[windy-maverick]

Sorry, I am certainly a newbie when it comes to UBCD, but not a total novice. I have changed the boot order on all the pcs that I am working with and double-checked it. And to be even more certain, have put in a Windows CD and seen that boot properly. So it is not the BIOS settings.

Mark

[as702]

Does this said PC (Dell PowerEdge) come equipped with a floppy drive?
http://www.wolfgang-brinkmann.de/bcdw/bcdl150z.zip

Bootable CD Loader
Enables PCs that do not support boot from CD (Bootable CD) to start bootable CDs..

[Icecube]

Update isolinux and see if it help.
See the relevant part at the following topic:
viewtopic.php?t=1350

[windy-maverick]

How do I get the UBCD "unpacked" to the C: drive so that I have a C:\ubcd path to find all this other stuff at??

Mark

[Icecube]

Use 7zip (free), winrar, winzip, ... or any other decent compression/decompression utility. Right click on the ubcd iso file and select the right option. You also can mount the iso with Daemon tools and copy the files from the virtual cd drive to a directory.

[windy-maverick]

Okay, I have made some progress. I remastered the UBCD with the new isolinux and also included my drive imaging exe into the dosapps. That works quite nice on workstations that I try it on. However, I've tried it on two servers with no luck. I try it on a HP Proliant 360dl and it goes past the cd and to the hd boot. I try it on a Dell Poweredge and I even invoke the F11 boot menu and select teh cd drive and it displays that it is attempting to boot from the cd, but does not. I then went thru the same sequence with a Windows Server CD that I burned to see if the cd drive would recognize a cd-r and that worked fine. Any further ideas?

[Icecube]

It is very strange that you can't boot the CD on the 2 servers, but that it works on other PCs. It is also strange that the windows CD will boot on the server PCs. The windows setup CD and UBCD use both the no-emulation option to boot from a cd. The windows CD can be booted by the bios (supports booting CDs in no- emulation mode) so isolinux on the UBCD should load. Don't you see anything when you try to boot from UBCD on the servers (something like: ISOLINUX V3.17 <date> Copyright (C) 1994-2008 H. Peter Anvin)?

You can build the iso again but this time you use isolinux-debug.bin (rename to isolinux.bin) of the syslinux archive (/core/isolinux-debug.bin. Burn it to an CD-RW if you have one (to save a CD-R ). If the boot sector of the cd gets loaded, you should see some extra output. Write it down exactly. You probably have to post the output to the syslinux mailing list, so they can solve it. Provide enough info about your hardware.

You also can try to boot UBCD from an usb stick (use the ubcd2usb script). This probably also won't work because most PCs can boot CDs which have isolinux, but not always from an usb stick due buggy bios usb code.

After a quick look at the internet, I found websites which describe booting CDs with isolinux on the hardware that you have, without any problems (not completely true, but the isolinux part of the cd worked at least).

You also can post to the syslinux mailing list if we can't solve the problem. Describe your hardware in great detail, etc.

I don't know if it can help or not, but you can always try: remove every unnessecary device / card temporary out of the server that you don't need directly, so that you only have the cdrom drive atached (remove the hard disks connections temporally too). Remove also some RAM if possible (normally shouldn't matter, but you never know). Try if you can boot the server now with UBCD.

You also can download another live cd (e.g damn small linux, puppy linux, parted magic) and burn it. They all use isolinux as bootloader. See if you can boot them.

You also can try to make ubcd with grub4dos as bootlaoder instead of isolinux:
See the post of ilko at: http://www.boot-land.net/forums/?showtopic=4486&st=10

Problematic CD-ROM controllers

At least one Promise ATA-type controller with BIOS (model number unknown) does not work with ISOLINUX since it hard-codes the location of the El Torito boot catalogue from the Windows 2000 CD-ROM and will only boot from this location!!!!!! The reporter of this bug was able to get it to boot by hacking mkisofs to put the boot catalogue in the same location as the Windows 2000 one.

[windy-maverick]

I really don't know if you can help with this, and it is not UBCD, I think it is more a FreeDos issue. As I mentioned when I started this thread, I am mostly trying to run some Drive Imaging software on a pair of matching Dell PowerEdge 2850's. I still think UBCD is part of the solution, but I'm trying to move forward, so I tried to just boot the servers from the floppy drives today. This is a FreeDos disk that Drive Snapshot includes with their application. It works fine if I just boot it without checking for USB drives, but the drive images are big enough that a USB drive or thumb drive would be of great benefit. But I get this error sequence when I take the FreeDos option to look for the USB drives. If you can help it would be great.

The following error happens when I boot the Dell PowerEdge 2850 from the floppy drive. This error does not happen when I allow FreeDos to load without looking for the USB drives, only when I select the option to search for the USB does this happen.

It does the search for the USB drives and appears to work.

Finds the one I have connected and assigns a drive letter.

Goes on to find the IDE CD-Rom drive.
CD-Rom drive #0 found on 1Foh port master device, V3.AB

Kernel: allocated 43 diskbuffers = 22876 bytes in HMA
-----------string of special characters shows here---------------

Invalid opcode at 03CC 0000 0046 0800 0000 0000 0000 0000 0800 0001 00C1 E000 00FE

Bad or missing Command Interpreter: \Command.Com /p /e:1024
Enter the full shell command line:

Thanks in advance for any help. Mark

[as702]

I really don't know if you can help with this, and it is not UBCD, I think it is more a FreeDos issue. As I mentioned when I started this thread, I am mostly trying to run some Drive Imaging software on a pair of matching Dell PowerEdge 2850's. I still think UBCD is part of the solution, but I'm trying to move forward, so I tried to just boot the servers from the floppy drives today. This is a FreeDos disk that Drive Snapshot includes with their application. It works fine if I just boot it without checking for USB drives, but the drive images are big enough that a USB drive or thumb drive would be of great benefit. But I get this error sequence when I take the FreeDos option to look for the USB drives. If you can help it would be great.

The following error happens when I boot the Dell PowerEdge 2850 from the floppy drive. This error does not happen when I allow FreeDos to load without looking for the USB drives, only when I select the option to search for the USB does this happen.

It does the search for the USB drives and appears to work.

Finds the one I have connected and assigns a drive letter.

Goes on to find the IDE CD-Rom drive.
CD-Rom drive #0 found on 1Foh port master device, V3.AB

Kernel: allocated 43 diskbuffers = 22876 bytes in HMA
-----------string of special characters shows here---------------

Invalid opcode at 03CC 0000 0046 0800 0000 0000 0000 0000 0800 0001 00C1 E000 00FE

Bad or missing Command Interpreter: \Command.Com /p /e:1024
Enter the full shell command line:

Thanks in advance for any help. Mark

Does this said PC (Dell PowerEdge) come equipped with a floppy drive?
http://www.wolfgang-brinkmann.de/bcdw/bcdl150z.zip

Bootable CD Loader
Enables PCs that do not support boot from CD (Bootable CD) to start bootable CDs..

Listen to this guy.

Also, update the UBCD FreeDOS image and tell me if these problems continue to manifest.
viewtopic.php?t=1422

Try it, let me know how you progress...

Edit:

Also, were you using a CD-RW when trying to boot? Some older CD-ROM drives experience problems reading/booting from re-writeable media. It may be worth trying CD-R if you haven't done so already.