#12 Add Windows PE FAT32 boot record (used by install/recovery of Windows 7 from USB drive)

[Michael Schierl]

Add support for the boot record used by Windows Vista/7/etc's FAT32 install and recovery media, as written by the bootsect.exe utility available on those media.

There is a script at https://gist.github.com/schierlm/612c8661bd8b2351e018 that does the job for me (by starting with ms-sys -2 and binary patching some offsets using xxd); having it integrated in ms-sys would make it easier to use.

Tested on drives of different sizes, and with different partition numbers (with a Linux partition in front of it and not). But (as the disclaimer states) no guarantee it works in all scenarios.

Especially useful to install Windows for dual-boot on a Linux system when there are plenty of partitions available but no external media (you can install Windows from a hard disk partition to another one as well as from USB).

[Henrik Carlqvist]

Thanks for bootsect.sh which contains all info needed to add this feature! If I create a new version of ms-sys with this feature added, would you be able to build ms-sys from source and test that it works as intended?

[Michael Schierl]

Sure. I built my copy of ms-sys from source too. As ms-sys contains binary blobs that are not open source, it is not included in Debian.

So there is no problem for me to compile it myself and then test it on a quickly built Win7 install partition.

[Henrik Carlqvist]

I have now made a first attempt to add your support for FAT32 PE boot record. The latest source code is available by anonymous CVS access as described on https://sourceforge.net/p/ms-sys/code/
Just press enter if you get a password prompt at the login step.
Replace "modulename" with "ms-sys" when checking out the code.

Please let me know if the code works as expected. If so, I will make a new release.

[Michael Schierl]

Wow, I think last time I used CVS was 5-10 years ago, so I first had to install it again.

Tested it both on a physical USB drive, and on a virtual disk that I first "initialized" from /dev/urandom. And it works fine, thanks for the quick response!

[Henrik Carlqvist]

Well, back 2002 when I started developing ms-sys CVS was still state of the art. Even though early versions of subversion existed back then CVS was the safe choice. Maybe I should have migrated from CVS to subversion and from subversion to git, but CVS still works as fine as it did back then.

Thanks alot for your contribution and testing! Version 2.4.1 is now among the files for download. I will update the ms-sys web-page later.

[Henrik Carlqvist]

Feature added to version 2.4.1.