Preparing a Remote Boot Image for Deployment

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When you start your system using your run-time image on a system that is identical to the one that is going to be booted using Remote Boot service, the system is configured by First Boot Agent (FBA). The FBA service requires one or more system boots, making it unusable with the Remote Boot service. Therefore, you must run FBA before creating the deployable Remote Boot image.

To configure your image correctly using FBA

  1. Copy the run-time image to the drive C of your target system. If you configured the target system as a multi-boot device, avoid overwriting the Boot.ini file on drive C to retain multi-boot capability. The Boot.ini file is not necessary in the final RamDisk/SDI image.
  2. Run your run-time image on the target system as drive C to let the FBA phase finish. If you installed the System Cloning Tool component, FBA completes operation when the "Machine Resealed" message appears.

To prepare a Remote Boot image for deployment

  1. In the BIOS setup utility of the client computer, configure the network boot attempt to occur first.

  2. Install the SDI Driver on your development system.

    For more information, see the SDI documentation in the Windows XP Embedded Help documentation.

  3. Create an SDI disk of the appropriate size using the SDI loader utility.

  4. Format the SDI virtual drive using Disk Management Console, Diskmgmt.msc. When prompted, do not choose to create the volume as a dynamic disk.

  5. Copy your run-time image to the SDI volume. It is not necessary to copy the Ntdetect.com, Ntldr.exe, or Boot.ini files to the SDI volume because they are automatically downloaded from the server during an early phase of Remote Boot.

  6. Create another SDI image that will contain the partition for the SDI disk created in Step 2. This will be the final SDI image that will reside on the Remote Boot server. The following command line example shows how to create the new SDI image using the SDI manager command line utility.

    sdimgr /new c:\ramdisk.sdi
sdimgr c:\ramdisk.sdi /readpart:e:

  7. Copy the SDI image to the \Program Files\Windows Embedded\Remote Boot Service\Downloads folder of the server.

  8. If you choose to use a Boot.ini file that resides on the server, you must add the /rdimageoffset=4096 switch to the Boot.ini file to accommodate the structure of your SDI file. This step is not necessary if you are using the Remote Boot manager and not a Boot.ini file with an SDI image that uses an .sdi extension.

    Note   The first 4 KB of each SDI image file consists of the SDI header information. The remaining contains the partition image.

See Also

Remote Boot Overview | Installing the Remote Boot Server | Configuring the Remote Boot Service Using Remote Boot Manager | Starting and Stopping Remote Boot Services | Configuring DHCP for Remote Boot Services | Using a Boot.ini File in a Remote Boot Environment | Remote Boot Response Time