Richard -
Thanks for all your work on this. In retrospect, I might have been able to
save you some headache. The CD from which I loaded windows is in fact a
Gateway Operating System Backup CD. But I did not even think of that as the
cause because it looks like a regular Windows CD: you can even boot it.
Quite odd, I must say. I'll see if I can find a generic copy of windows.
I'm almost sure I can, because we have a site license for that kind of thing
here, but I just was trying to use the CD I had.
You're right, this does not bode well for users that install Linux as their
primary OS, and simply want to install windows "underneath" it. This is
epecially aggravating because I have a full and legal license for one copy of
Windows, but because I'm not installing it under a "clean" system, I cannot
use it. I would suspect, then, that this CD would not work under VMware,
either, since it's BIOS would not match.
Is there anyway I can "copy" my computer's BIOS to an image file, and use
that as the BIOS for Win4Lin, or does Win4Lin require it's own special BIOS?
Maybe I'll see if I can get a second hard drive, install to that, and go from
there. Or maybe that's not worth the trouble, and I'll get a real Windows CD.
The contents of that errmsg.ini file to which you refer are:
gwonly=This CD is only for use on a Gateway computer.
nowrite=Unable to write to drive.
That stinks. :)
Brain storm: not being familiar with the internals of Win4Lin, I have no idea
if or how this would work, but here is an idea. The Win4Lin "BIOS" obviously
responds to a request for an ID of some sort. Would it be possible to make
this function call "pass through" to the host computer, so CD's like this
would get the BIOS ID of the computer they will be running on?
Again, thanks for all your help. I look forward to actually getting this
working.
j----- k-----
On Thursday 14 December 2000 08:45, Richard Bass wrote:
> "Joshua J. Kugler" wrote:
> > Here you go Richard. The file is only 27K, so I didn't bother zipping
> > it. Thanks for all your help. I really appreciate it.
>
> [ For those whom I am CC'ing or BCC'ing, the background on this is that
> Joshua has been trying to install windows 98 SE with the 2.0 Eval version.
> All goes well until the install windows phase, at which point he gets an
> "error 24". This error 24 means that the first phase of windows
> installation failed. I have looked at several log files and have seen that
> the setup program accesses two files not on any win98SE CD that I have:
> errmsg.ini and biosid.exe . It then exits without any error message ]
>
> The news is not good, I think. It appears to me that the win98SE CD that
> you have has some special copy protection feature that only lets it get
> installed on the system that it came with. Now you might say that, in
> fact, you ARE installing it on the system it came with. However, win4lin
> provides a "virtual computer" environment that is generic and does not
> match your specific hardware. Thus, tricks that the setup program use to
> detect the real underlying computer type will fail.
>
> You have a couple of different options here. The first is to procure
> another copy of win9x that is generic and can be installed on any computer.
> The other option is something that we don't fully support (yet) but which
> might work anyway. It is an install method known as "slurp" install.
> The concept is that if you have a dual boot system where windows is
> installed on a native partition, you can install windows from that
> native windows partition.
>
> Because of the vagaries of windows configurations and disk layouts, this
> approach does not always work and we didn't have enough time to work all
> this out before the release of 2.0; so it is not documented. However,
> the underlying code is still there. Since you were able to load the
> windows CD and install DOS, you may be in pretty good shape.
>
> Note that a slurp install will cause all of your windows 'C' drive to
> get copied into your $HOME/win directory. This may take up lots of room
> if you have a lot of programs/fonts/etc installed.
>
> In any event, the way to try this is to enter the following command
> from an xterm shell logged in as a regular (non-root) user:
> installwindows slurp
>
> If you have problems, you might first have to "unloadwindowsCD".
>
> Again, this approach is not really supported yet so your mileage
> might vary. Slurp is very important because of these new copy-protected
> CDs, so it will be supported in an upcoming release.
>
> Good luck.
>
>
> Richard <rwg>
--
Joshua Kugler
Associated Students of the University of Alaska Fairbanks
Information Services Director
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
907-474-7601
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