I have added a new section to the bottom of Tutorial 127 which describes how to add rEFInd to your E2B USB drive so that you can boot to other payload EFI files directly from your E2B USB drive besides Windows PE.
rEFInd will create a menu automatically by searching for .efi boot files, so it is really simple to add it to your UEFI-bootable drive - just copy over the folder and move a few files!
Note that a few UEFI systems will not MBR-boot if a \efi\boot\bootx64.efi file is present on the USB drive - they do not show any MBR boot option and will only UEFI boot. This means you cannot boot to the E2B grub4dos menu even if they support MBR\CSM mode booting! This is why E2B does not include any \EFI boot folder or rEFInd by default.
rEFInd will create a menu automatically by searching for .efi boot files, so it is really simple to add it to your UEFI-bootable drive - just copy over the folder and move a few files!
For E2B users - see here for the download.
Note that a few UEFI systems will not MBR-boot if a \efi\boot\bootx64.efi file is present on the USB drive - they do not show any MBR boot option and will only UEFI boot. This means you cannot boot to the E2B grub4dos menu even if they support MBR\CSM mode booting! This is why E2B does not include any \EFI boot folder or rEFInd by default.
Hi Steve:
ReplyDeleteThe most reliable way to make a pendrive bootable on any system (at least for Windows users) is to use Windows boot Manager. In addition to the Windows installers themselves, there are plenty of WinPe. With Windows Boot Manager we can boot in both Legacy and UEFI, both x86 and x64.
There are some unimportant limitations, such as the impossibility of having submenus (all payloads go together).
The amount of work and study behind E2B is impressive. I have a pendrive created with your system with a multitude of payloads and it works perfectly, but it has a major drawback, and there are more and more only UEFI systems and in those cases, although possible, E2B is not practical. It is for this reason that I use a manually created pendrive with the help of Bootice only and based only on Windows Boot Manager and another with Aioboot. Aioboot allows you to quickly boot both Legacy and UEFI without having to enter the BIOS to activate CSM or to deactivate Secure Boot, and it is really easy to create a universal pendrive. I use E2B only for old computers that start only in Legacy mode, which are becoming less and less. I see that you are trying to rely on Grub2 for UEFI multiboot, but I see that WinPe and Windows Setup are barely mentioned, it seems much more focused on Linux.
Have you tried adding a second FAT32 partition to the E2B drive as suggested?
ReplyDeletehttp://www.easy2boot.com/add-payload-files/refind/
You can then Secure UEFI-boot on any system and select any .imgPTN file payload.
The problem with having a UEFI-bootable FAT32 partition on a USB drive, is that some systems will NEVER MBR-boot from that drive because they will always UEFI-boot. This is a BIOS bug but it is present in a great many UEFI-BIOSes.
P.S. The grub2 menu system will boot WinPE and Windows Setup ISOs via UEFI (but not Secure Boot). I have found that grub2, rEFInd, etc. are not 100% reliable across a wide variety of systems. That is why I also agree that using Windows Boot Manager for UEFI is best and that is why I use that to switch in different .imgPTN files. http://www.easy2boot.com/add-payload-files/refind/
DeleteP.S. AIOBoot 'borrowed' my ideas, techniques and code!