He started on his modern laptop, downloading an ISO of Windows 2000 Professional SP4. First, he tried the obvious: Rufus. But Rufus just laughed. Windows 2000’s setup kernel, setupldr.bin , was written before USB booting was a standard. It looked for txtsetup.sif on a floppy or a CD, not a flash drive.
Leo was determined. The CNC’s proprietary control software cost more than a used car, and it only ran on Windows 2000. He had one afternoon to resurrect the dinosaur.
title Install Windows 2000 map --mem /WIN2000/setup.iso (0xff) map --hook chainloader (0xff) Except he didn't have a single ISO. He had the loose files. He spent an hour using mkisofs -b boot.bin to craft a perfect, 680MB hybrid ISO that fit on the drive. The command line arguments looked like a magic spell: -no-emul-boot -boot-load-seg 0x7c0 -boot-info-table .
For an hour, he swore at a machine older than some interns. Then he had a terrible, beautiful idea. He unplugged the USB drive, ran to his laptop, and used a tool called nLite to USB mass storage drivers directly into the Windows 2000 installation source. He rebuilt the ISO, rewrote the USB drive, and started over.
And that's where disaster struck. After reboot, the graphical part of setup loaded from the hard drive, but it immediately asked for the "Windows 2000 Professional Service Pack 4 CD" to copy driver files. It couldn't find the USB drive because the graphical setup didn't have USB drivers loaded yet.
It worked. The text-mode setup launched. It copied files from the "CD" (the USB). But then came the first reboot.
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