HDM 2009 Suite: Problem with Recovery media on USB flash

Hi,

We are running XP Pro on an embedded product. For this I'm trying to create a bootable recovery media on a USB Flash Disk (the computer has USB but no CD drive). The computer can boot from USB, I've succeeded to do so with both DOS and Syslinux. But when I use the Recovery Media Builder to create the bootable USB media the computer won't boot. It recognises the USB media as a bootable USB hard disk but just stops.

Has this problem been seen before?

One thing I've noticed is that the USB has been formatted as NTFS. All other USB media formatting I've seen is FAT or FAT32. This includes the successful attempts I've made with DOS and Syslinux.

Is it possible to work around this and build the recovery media as a FAT32 or FAT partition?

Most grateful for any advice on this

 

Hello wilsec,

The problem may not have to do with FAT32 or NTFS, but the actual embedded device. Here are a few possibilities or explanations why it does not work. First of all, check with the manufacturer of the device to see if able to boot other USB devices. Take a look inside the BIOS to see how it emulates USB devices (removable devices or local HDD).

Also, it's possible that the linux/dos disk is not compatible with your hardware. To verify this, test with an external CD/DVD drive and create a bootable CD/DVD. If you get as far as selecting Normal/Safe mode, first try Safe mode.

Lastly, you can avoid using the CD/DVD and USB bootable option all together by installing a Backup Capsule. What that does is create a bootable partition within the hard drive with the same bootable software found on a bootable CD/DVD/USB media. A hot key will be assigned to trigger the capsule.

 

Hi Tommy,

Thanks for your answer.

Seems I missed to include some information and was a bit unclear on others.

First, when I wrote "The computer can boot from USB" I meant USB flash memory. So the embedded device can boot DOS and Syslinux from a USB flash HD.

Second, I missed to say that I created a CD with Recovery Media Builder, connected a USB CD/DVD reader to the embedded device and it booted perfectly. So the linux/dos disk IS compatible with our hardware.

But, using a CD for recovery isn't a good solution for our customers so we really want to use a USB flash HD.

We already use the Backup Capsule but that is of no use if the only HD on our hardware crashes.

Today I had Recovery Media Builder load my USB flash HD with your WinPE Recovery image. Our embedded device succeeded to start the booting procedure with a lengthy "Windows loading files" part. Then WinPE complained about the device not having ACPI activated. Pressing F8 showed a menu with different startup configurations. Testing these always stopped on the ACPI issue. Enabling ACPI did only make matters worse.

So the WinPE disk is not compatible with our hardware, it seems. But, the WinPE disk is formatted as NTFS and it booted. So maybe the problem has nothing to do with FAT32 or NTFS, as you wrote.

The linux/dos USB flash disk does boot a standard PC at work so there must be some kind of incompatibility with our hardware.

Is it possible to set up the DOS version of your recovery program in a standard DOS USB flash disk?

Or do you have any other suggestion?

Regards

 

The only other option is to build a BartPE recovery disk (iso) and then write it to your usb flash drive.

Here's how to create that iso:
https://www.wilderssecurity.com/showthread.php?t=257771

In the BartPE manual, you can write to a usb flash drive with pe2usb.cmd

 

Thanks. I finally have a bootable USB flash HD with HDM 2009 Suite on it. I still have some testing to do regarding restore functionality etc.

I have a couple of comments on the procedure in the thread you linked to.

- The deletion of the registry key MiniNT doesn't seem to matter in my case, HDM starts regardless of if the MiniNT key is there or not.

- I had some problems with the pe2usb.cmd batch file. In the end it was solved with an ENABLEEXTENSIONS argument on the setlocal line. I don't know if this is specific to my work PC (running XP Pro swedish on a network with Small Business Server). Anyway, this info might help somebody else.

- The boot procedure is VERY slow. I think I saw something about that while searching this forum and the BartPE forum for information but haven't had time to search for it again yet. I'd apreciate any comment from you on this issue.

- The USB is formatted as FAT16 which means that the maximum size of the boot partition is 2 GB. This isn't an issue for us right now but it might be for us in the future and of course it might be for others right now.

I also have a licensing issue question but I suppose it should be in a separate thread so I will create a new one.

Thanks a lot