The new RSOD

Original source, Michael Kaplan, a Technical Lead in the GIFT (Globalization Infrastructure, Fonts, and Tools) team at Microsoft. If you read the original post you discover that he caused this error deliberately by fiddling with a registry setting.

I agree with Michael - it's not much clearer about what the problem is than the previous XP error message.

wacko wrote:

Well you know what’s that from, its now that windows boots out of that PE environment where its not running that dos shell for the installer it has to have some sort of error and those errors are not the same as the BSOD errors. Because they can only happen in the setup portion or at least that’s where they have been encountered. So I really don't think they should get as much flack because that error should be rarely seen and if it is then there really likley is an issue with the ISO or CD he is booting from or the VM machine. To me its just a simple way to get out.

Windows NT-based operating systems have never loaded any part of DOS during the boot cycle. The boot sector is loaded by the BIOS, the boot sector then locates NTLDR which is the actual loader. When booting Setup, NTLDR loads the kernel - the same NTOSKRNL.EXE as when Windows is running - and switches into 32-bit protected mode. It may not be graphical, but it's still NT (2000, XP, 2003).

In previous generations there were obviously constraints for Setup. Two that I can think of that seriously restrict what can be done in the first phase of Setup are the requirement to boot from floppy disk (Windows Server 2003 still supports this, I think it requires 3 disks) and the fact that paging is disabled. Paging has to be disabled - after all, you haven't yet told Windows where to install to. Since paging is disabled you can't load very large driver binaries - remember that NT 4.0 was supported on 32MB RAM, and Windows 2000 Professional's minimum requirement was 64MB. That effectively means you can't use the graphical environment until you've created the system volume and a page file.

Anyway, those restrictions largely don't apply any more. Many machines are now coming without floppy drives; certainly all machines powerful enough to run Longhorn will have bootable CD or DVD drives. That eliminates one size restriction. The other size restriction, RAM, doesn't apply either - Longhorn machines are likely to have at least 512MB, which is plenty of room to work without paging until the system partition has been formatted.