E2B v1.62 Beta 2 for .dmg and HFS partition images now available

E2B v1.62 Beta 2 now recognises 4 new file extensions and it is now available from the Alternate Downloads Area as usual on the www.easy2boot.com website:

• .dmg and .dmgHFS - these behave identically. The file must be uncompressed disk image and contain a single bootable Type AF  HFS+ partition
• .HFSptn and .HFS - this must be a bootable partition image (not a disk image) and should be of Type AF (HFS+ partition)

For testing, I used Yosemite-Zone.dmg  which installs the Mac OS X OS 'Yosemite' and which contained a single HFS+ partition. If you are curious, open the file using 7Zip and you should see the following:

This type of .dmg file should 'just work' if you copy the .dmg file to a normal E2B menu folder (e.g. \_ISO\MAINMENU). Notice that the size of the 0.img file inside it is about the same as the .dmg file - so it is not compressed.

Also note that 7Zip is showing Offset, Primary, Begin CHS and End CHS columns which indicates it is a disk image.

If 7Zip does not show these column headings, it may be a compressed .DMG file...

If your .dmg file is compressed, then you will see a larger .hfs file lurking inside:

In this case, just extract the 0.hfs file from the .dmg file using 7Zip and then rename the 0.hfs file to something more appropriate - e.g. Maverick Installer.HFS. It must say 'whole disk' and have no other parts listed.

If you see more than one file inside the .dmg, then it may not work! Extract the largest one and try that one as a .HFSptn file. If the .dmg file contains multiple partitions and there are important files on one of the other partitions, then it is not going to work because currently only one HFS+ partition can be added to E2B!

Note that E2B will write a permanent partition entry into the MBR partition table, so when you next reboot, E2B will ask if you want to delete it and will not continue until you do! You can use a partnew command in your \_ISO\MyE2B.cfg file to always delete partition 4 and then you will never get the warning message again when booting E2B. See the Sample_MyE2B.cfg file for details.

If you have downloaded Yosemite 10.10 from the App Store then this is not bootable; you can create a bootable USB Flash drive from it using UniBeast and then make a .HFSptn file from the USB Flash drive and add the image to your E2B drive. See my previous blog entry for more details.

Testing

If testing this, note that booting to the Installer OS can be quite pernickety!

Under VBox, you may just get a boot:/boot1 error. Try a real system.

Some OS X Installers do not work on a Haswell CPUs and if testing using VBox, it is best to create a new VM with default settings for Mac OS X 10.9 64-bit Maverick, lots of RAM and enable CPU acceleration. You may also need to apply a 'fix' if your Haswell CPU is not recognised. The wrong chipset, graphics adapter or network card can also cause problems! Also, the large NTFS partitions on my E2B boot drive seemed to cause problems sometimes with large delays during booting (sometimes it would boot within 1.5 minutes, other times it would stick and not boot at all!).

Note that at the 'Bluetooth controller' driver load point, there can be 1 minute or more with no disk or screen activity - so be patient! If it takes more than 2 minutes then start to worry!

If any problems, type -v -x before pressing ENTER to boot from the boot menu.

If it used to work but has stopped working, try creating a new VM. Success when testing under VBox seemed very erratic and I could not work out why, but using -v -x at the boot menu seemed to help greatly!

Guide for installing Yosemite-Zone here.