[Qemu-devel] W2K minor and not so minor hurdles

[Emmanuel Charpentier]

Dear list,

Thank to your help, I have been able to attack the creation of a Win2K disk.

It essentially works. But I met some booboos and I'm currently fighting 
some issues. Since I don't know what the booboos meant, They might well be 
the cause of my current problems.

Setup : I made a Win2K SP4 boot disk starting with a W2K non-bootable disk 
and the instructions pointed at in a recent message 
(http://www.bink.nu/bootcd, iirc ...).

I've made various attempts with qemu-cow disks varying from 1 to 4 GB in 
size and memory allocations varying from none (no -m option) to 512 Mb. The 
 booboos and problems are fairly consistent and reproductible.

the first pass goes always OK : the disk is formatted (NTFS in all cases). 
The second pass starts well with a (lengthy) hardware detection phase, then 
a configuratioon phase (mostly national options for display, date/time, etc 
...). Afterwards, the system tells me that the list of options to be 
installed is too long, and that I should modify this list. Whatever I'm 
doing (suppressing all possible options, for example), I end up with the 
need to install 21 Mb of options with 0 Mb available on the disk. So I 
abort the installation ("q" in the monitor).

Restarting the very same installation  gives very curious results : the 
installer stards again, but the hardware detection phase seems much faster 
(sory, no hard data on this one, I didn't use a stopwatch ...) and the 
installation proceeds after the "national options" phase without further 
noise about a full disk. However, all is not rosy : during the "component 
installation", I have very consistently an error telling (backtranslated 
from French) :

The COM+ subcomponent has raised an exception during processing of the 
installatio program message.
OC_COMPLETE_INSTALLATION
.\csetuputil.cpp(line 3419)
Error code = 0x800703e6

Access to this memory address is invalid.
Library can't be loaded
C:\WINNT\system32\catsvr.dll


Before that, I may or may not get another error telling me "error loading 
catsvrutl.dll" : invalid memory access to this adress" (and no, no address 
is specified ...).

However, the installation proceeds and, lo, after another reboot, I get a 
(more or less, see below) functional W2K installation.

A booboo : I haven't yet be able to use an "-fda" floppy or floppy image. 
W2K tells me that the driver doesn't start, and no attempt has been able to 
revive it (deinstalling-reinstalling, booting all passes with a -fda 
option). Mistery ...

Another booboo is the video driver. Although the VBE drive is said to be 
able to go up to 1280x1024x32, I haven't be able to get more than 800x600x4 
(16 colors). I tried the BXVGA driver installer pointed at by some previous 
posts : this driver has two variant : the plain "BXVGA" version gave me 
black lines superimposed on the screen for about 2/3 to half its width, the 
second crashes the installation immediately after boot. Scratch one disk ...

More serious is the fact that I've been unable to install MS Office or 
mozilla. the MS Office 97 fails immediately after start, telling it can't 
read an ".sft" file (the very same disk installs perfectly on a native W2K 
installation ...). The mozilla installation fails after 3/4 of the 
installation, telling me that an error log is prepared (I've never been 
able to find it ...).

Any ideas ?

                                        Emmanuel Charpentier

PS : As usual, please Cc' me your answers, since I'm not on the list 
(reading it through the archives).