Windows Server 2003/XP OS on non-boot drive?

[GnatGoSplat]

I want to run a low-power Windows server using a Thin Client, HP T5700 to be specific. It normally runs XP Embedded on a 192MB flash disk. I have added into its ONLY PCI slot, a VIA combo SATA/eSATA/IDE/USB2.0 card utilizing the VT6421A and VT6214L chipset. I have a Seagate ST31000528AS 1TB drive connected to the VIA card. My TC only has USB 1.1 and one PCI slot, which is why this particular card was necessary - it was the ONLY one I could find with both SATA and USB 2.0 on a single card.

Anyway, the TC's BIOS does not see the VIA card, so there is no way to boot my 1TB HDD. It doesn't matter if I install Windows by using F6 to install drivers, the BIOS never knows about the card, so I presume the only way my 1TB HDD is ever visible is after VIA drivers are loaded. Obviously, the 192MB flash disk is too small to install Windows Server 2003. Is it possible to install Windows Server 2003 on the 1TB HDD, then install some kind of bootloader on the 192MB flash disk that will load the VIA drivers, recognize the 1TB HDD, and continue to boot off of that? I know such multi-booting is possible if the BIOS can see all the drives, but my case is unique in that drivers need to be loaded before the 1TB drive can even be seen. I have seen several tutorials on building boot disks and boot floppies that involve copying over NTLDR, NTDETECT.COM, etc. However, none of those tutorials involve the ability to load controller drivers. I think those tutorials all assume the BIOS can see the disk.

I know the VIA card and HDD are fully compatible with each other as I tried them in a Windows 7 machine.

So is it even possible to load an OS from a disk which isn't recognized by BIOS by pre-loading drivers from another disk? If this is not possible, my only alternative is to buy an 8GB CF to install the OS onto, but I'd rather not have to go that route.

 

[rudder]

I would think that before drivers can be loaded for a device... the BIOS needs to be able to recognize the device.

But I deal a lot with SCSI and the BIOS only sees the scsi controller... it is the SCSI bios that sees the drives... to in order to install an OS, the scsi drivers are loaded and voila... the drives are there. This is the way most servers (at least our Hewlett Packard servers) work. So I think you should be good.

 

[GnatGoSplat]

I messed with this all last night, but no luck. 🙁
I thought I had come upon the solution - I discovered the HP BIOS is made by Award, so I used CBROM to inject VT6421A BIOS into the TC's BIOS, flashed it, and hoped I didn't kill it. That part worked, I now see a VIA splash screen, I can hit TAB during the VIA splash screen and see the drive connected to the controller. However, it won't try to boot that drive because there is no option for "Other Boot Device" or "SCSI" in the BIOS. The only options are USB, ATA Flash Disk, Network, or Disabled. Argh! Foiled again!
I did end up making an install disk for Windows Server 2003 R2 on a USB flash and slipstreamed the VIA driver into it. That allowed the installer to see my 1TB drive on the VIA controller and install Windows onto it. Windows recognized only the flash disk can boot, so it put NTLDR, NTDETECT.COM, and BOOT.INI on the flash disk, pointing to multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(2)partition(1)\WINDOWS, which is the ARC address of my 1TB drive AFTER the viamraid.sys driver is loaded. However, upon reboot, NTLDR boots up on the flash disk, then tries to boot the OS from the 1TB drive, but can't see it. I get a message about the disk configuration being incorrect. I'm guessing this is because multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(2)partition(1)\WINDOWS doesn't exist until AFTER viamraid.sys is loaded.

My last ditch effort was to copy viamraid.sys to the flash disk and name it NTBOOTDD.SYS. In order to force it to load that driver, you have to use scsi (or signature) instead of multi, so I changed boot.ini to scsi(0)disk(0)rdisk(2)partition(1)\WINDOWS (just changing multi to scsi). That didn't work, so I thought maybe the disk is mapped differently when using scsi instead of multi, so I tried changing rdisk to 0 and 1, but neither worked.

I know in theory this should work, because the VIA controller looks like a SCSI card, and the purpose of using NTBOOTDD.SYS is so the OS can be loaded from a BIOS-less SCSI card, but for some reason I just can't get this to work!