paperlined.org
sysadmin > boot > cd-resident > crap
document updated 16 years ago, on Oct 25, 2008
If you use Hiren's bootCD/UltimateBootCD/... much, you start to notice that there's lots of DOS drivers being loaded. What a crazy blast from the past, huh? You quickly move on, hoping you can forget that painful part of history.

Unfortunately, if you do Ghost much, you still have to remain familiar with them.


Ultimately, the issue is that you want to work on a computer without booting to its main OS (ie. before an OS has been installed, or when you want to have absolutely exclusive access to the disk as with Ghost). But that means that your boot environment needs to contain a separate copy of all drivers needed. (most notably: CD drive, network card, and USB mass storage)

That would be easy if you could use a LiveCD, since they're designed to do exactly that (thus the popularity of Linux LiveCDs). Unfortunately, Microsoft believes that that an widely-accessible live-Windows is a trivially-pirated Windows. So, while live-Windows CDs do exist, they come with enough strings attached (WinPE is available only to OEMs, and BartPE exists in a legal gray area) that large software developers avoid them. Therefore, professional Windows-oriented tools almost always work in "live DOS" environment instead.

So... sysadmins end up collecting DOS drivers. (yes, floppy drives themselves are fading into prehistory, but someone created the monstrosity known as DOS bootCDs (see syslinux's MEMDISK), granting DOS a brief stay of execution)

This explains what "floppy emulation", "hard-drive emulation" and "no emulation" modes are.

Two-stage, floppy-emulation, then full CD

Single-stage, no-emulation