Tuesday 12 March 2013

Easy2Boot BETA02

I have modified the Easy2Boot Beta, now BETA02 is available.

The first menu is now dynamic and built up from the contents of the \MAINMENU folder. You can place .mnu files and .ISO files in the \MAINMENU folder and they will be listed in the first menu.

Please note: This version is intended to be used on a flash drive and on a real system. Linux ISOs and Windows Vista/7/8 installs won't work correctly under an emulator or if run from a hard disk.

The first (main) menu is currently:

Boot from ISO (AutoISO)   - any ISO file in the \AutoISO folder is listed by the next menu - comes from \mainmenu\Auto_menu.mnu file
Easy2Boot                           - launches the Easy2Boot menu - .mnu files under \_ISO will compiled into an Easy2Boot menu - comes from \mainmenu\easy2boot.mnu
Boot to first internal HDD    - this comes from the \mainmenu\firsthdd.mnu file which can be deleted if not wanted
Install Windows                   - comes from \mainmenu\installwindows.mnu
 xxxxxxx.iso                        - any iso file in the \mainmenu folder is automatically listed in the main menu
yyyyyyyy.iso                        - any iso file in the \mainmenu folder is automatically listed in the main menu

I have debugged some more of the install windows menus too.

To use Easy2Boot  v1 Beta02, you just need to:
1. add Windows install ISO files to the correct folders under \_ISO\Windows and name them correctly (the filenames are indicated in each folder). For Win8/svr2012, the product key can be entered or you can edit the menu to add your own product key or you can use a default dummy key which will not activate.
2. add your favourite bootable ISOs to the \mainmenu folder,
3. add any other ISOs to the \AutoISO folder
4. add any other payloads+.mnu files, downloaded from the Easy2Boot tutorial, to the relevant folders under \_ISO (the entries will be listed by the Easy2Boot 2ndary menu). These will be the odd ones that don't work just by copying them to the \AutoISO or \MainMenu folder.
If you want them listed in the main menu instead, simply copy the .mnu file to the \mainmenu folder (or make your own .mnu file) and copy the payload file to the \mainmenu folder instead of the \_ISO folder - e.g.
if you have fred.mnu and fred.iso which are supposed to go in \_ISO\Utility folder, you can move both to the \mainmenu\utility folder.

The order of the menu items in the main menu is determined by the order that the \mainmenu\xx.mnu files were written to the USB drive. This cannot be changed unless you re-write the same .mnu files again. If you want the order to be pre-determined, you could combine all the \mainmenu\xxx.mnu files into one single large .mnu file - or  - edit the \grub\main.mnu file so it contains all the menu entries you want.


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