2 Jan
2015
2 Jan
'15
9:51 p.m.
A final note, too (plus question): since our recent
PXE support (that
appears to work! Thanks to Jérôme + Pierre effort, and numerous testers)
somebody oriented me to how this is done in Windows: they have a
STARTROM.0 file that is the bootstrap (downloaded and ran by PXE thing)
which then loads a NTLDR (somewhat). I binary analyzed it and it seems to
be
of the same nature as the STPBOOT.BIN file, i.e.
16-bit bootstraper.
Question: does it load (after download) directly the 32-bit OSLOADER? OR
does it load the full NTLDR instead?, i.e. loading the 16-bit NTLDR part
(that then loads the 32-bit part)?
StartROM.0 (called startrom.com and startrom.n12 ins the installation media)
loads only a 32/64bit PE Setupldr.exe/Osloader.exe image, which is included
with every Windows versión based in the NT Kernel, in a compressed form ofc,
that's definitive. StartROM.0 is in effect the rought equivalent to
STPBOOT.BIN
in your example, but enabled for PXE booting.
The confusión comes because StartROM expects to find the loader image with
the
specific NTLDR file name, renaming process which is done by the built-in
Windows
Server RIS server, when you créate a Windows distribution directory with the
provided tools.