Forum: USBoot

on Fri 13 of Feb., 2009 18:55 CET, by PGSMICK

The way I want to use USBoot is to have a USB bootable drive that I can carry from PC to PC with a reasonable chance that I can boot on that hardware and perform OS installations and maintenance.

USBoot lets me get almost completely there. However, after I took my drive to the fourth different machine (an HP dc5800 slim desktop) and booted, that machine seems to have made changes that now prevent the device from booting on machine 2 (a generic PC with Intel mobo) where I had previously booted successfully. It still boots to machine 3 (a Dell Optiplex755), and it still boots to the HP. Whenever I boot to a new machine, I have been cancelling all "Found new hardware" prompts. (Actually, now that I think about it, it could have been some change that the Dell made that the HP doesn't care about, but which the Intel does.)

When I went to machine 2 after booting to the HP, I got initial boot action but quickly got a message that the ...\system32\config\system file was missing or corrupted. So I took the drive back to the HP, and it booted OK. Now when I return to machine 2, the system doesn't see the drive as having an OS at all, yet it still continues to boot on the HP and on the Dell.

Is there any way to troubleshoot what has happened here?

What, if anything, can I do to minimize or prevent this from happening again?

Any suggestions happily accepted,

Thanks,
Peter.

on Fri 13 of Feb., 2009 19:23 CET, by admin

One easy approach to prevent unintended alteration of the registry may be to force Windows loading the "last known good configuration" every time by adding the flag " /lastknowngood " in 'boot.ini'.

Apart from that please make sure that when creating your USB bootable installation you actually did execute ALL steps of phase III (respectively all except for the first one if you accomplished the transfer of the files by some other means).

Gerd

on Fri 13 of Feb., 2009 20:08 CET, by PGSMICK

>One easy approach to prevent unintended alteration of the registry may be to force >Windows loading the "last known good configuration" every time by adding the >flag " /lastknowngood " in 'boot.ini'.

Very nice.

>
> Apart from that please make sure that when creating your USB bootable installation you actually did execute ALL steps of phase III (respectively all except for the first one if you accomplished the transfer of the files by some other means).
>
> Gerd

You're quite right. As you know from previous posts, there may have been a problem completing Phase III on this first run. So, I'll redo it and report back if the same thing happens.

Thanks very much.

on Sun 15 of Feb., 2009 05:51 CET, by PGSMICK

Hi Gerd,

I prepared a second installation and everything completed successfully through all three phases.

I repeated the booting test on the same machines, but in a slightly different order, but with much the same results. This time I booted to the Intel machine, then the HP/Compaq machine. The HP/Compaq machine is definitely making some change on the drive that the Intel mobo won't deal with. It doesn't see any OS on the drive and complains about it not being a system disk. It nevertheless, continues to boot just fine on the Dell and the HP, and the ASUS on which it was created.

I'm not necessarily devoted to figuring this out, but it would be nice to know what's doing it so I could at least predict when it might happen. I think you can always count on HP/Compaq to do things just differently enough to cause problems.

Thanks again.
Peter.

on Mon 16 of Feb., 2009 00:13 CET, by admin

> I repeated the booting test on the same machines, but in a slightly different order, but with much the same results. This time I booted to the Intel machine, then the HP/Compaq machine. The HP/Compaq machine is definitely making some change on the drive that the Intel mobo won't deal with.

So if I got you right the installation initially does work on the INTEL motherboard but after being booted up once on the HP/Compaq machine subsequent tries to start on the INTEL mainboard will fail with the system just not recognizing the USB disk as bootable device so that the XP boot menu is not being displayed at all !?!

Gerd

on Thu 19 of Feb., 2009 19:53 CET, by PGSMICK

> So if I got you right the installation initially does work on the INTEL motherboard but after being booted up once on the HP/Compaq machine subsequent tries to start on the INTEL mainboard will fail with the system just not recognizing the USB disk as bootable device so that the XP boot menu is not being displayed at all !?!
>
> Gerd

Yes, that's the story. The device continues to boot properly on all the other test machines.

on Wed 27 of May, 2009 16:00 CEST, by Anatole

The same message ...\system32\config\system file was missing or corrupted.

I prepared USB-HDD with USBoot 2.10.zip on a PC with Intel Motherboard (Rogers City DG965RY) and Intel Core 2 Duo E6600. Default multi boot menu. I cannot boot on Intel D865PERL, Pentium 4 3GHz. The OS starts booting then the message appears: "...\system32\config\system file was missing or corrupted".

Intel MBoards specific problem?

on Fri 30 of Oct., 2009 08:01 CET, by luther349

the best way to avoid this is make hardware profiles for each pc. that way xp saves the hardware configs for each pc.

on Thu 28 of Jan., 2010 09:41 CET, by Zosso

Ive encountered much the same issues as the O.P. in my testing aswell.

>>the best way to avoid this is make hardware profiles for each pc. that way xp saves the hardware configs for each pc.>One easy approach to prevent unintended alteration of the registry may be to force Windows loading the "last known good configuration" every time by adding the flag " /lastknowngood " in 'boot.ini'.>Apart from that please make sure that when creating your USB bootable installation you actually did execute ALL steps of phase III (respectively all except for the first one if you accomplished the transfer of the files by some other means).

Forum: USBoot

Registry corrupted (?) after USB booted to several machines.

Sidebar

USBoot Logo

Menu

Translation

Sidebar

Login