Thursday 4 February 2021

Add Medicat v21.01 to your E2B USB drive

 Medicat 21.01 is in the form of zip files for use with 7Zip and Ventoy. You are supposed to extract the contents to the first partition of a previously-made Ventoy USB disk. Instead, you can just copy all the files (except \autorun.inf and \autorun.ico) to the root of your E2B first NTFS partition and only use Ventoy to boot to Medicat. This will add lots of folders to the root however and you may overwrite the contents of your \ventoy folder which will affect your existing Ventoy theme and menu settings (if you have any).

See also: https://rmprepusb.blogspot.com/2022/01/quickly-add-medicat-2112-to-easy2boot.html

Remember to disable your AntiVirus first (and check that it does not 'quarantine' any files on the USB drive once you have completed the copy and re-enabled your AV).


Medicat v21.01 zip file contents

Then simply boot to Ventoy from the E2B USB drive.

Note that copying the Medicat files will also add the \ventoy folder to the first E2B NTFS partition which includes a ventoy.json file. This will change the Ventoy theme and also change the menu entry names. You may find it educational to look at the ventoy.json to see what it does because a few ISO mey require special settings.

I found that quite a few of the menu entries had problems UEFI-booting on my Lenovo IdeaPad - maybe you will have better luck...

The alternative would be to selectively pick only the ISO or WIM files that you want, and add them into the existing E2B menu folders. This means you don't need to boot to Ventoy.

In most cases you do not need to add any of the other files (some may require the ventoy.json if anything 'special' needs to be done to run the ISO using Ventoy - so you may need that too).

Medicat Mini Windows

To add the Medicat WinPE, we need the file:
\Boot_an_Operating_System\[UEFI]_Mini_Windows_10.iso

Copy the ISO file to the \_ISO\WINPE folder (for instance). 

You will also need to copy the following files and folders to the root of the E2B NTFS partition #1 as they are required by Medicat Mini Windows 10 too (the Mini_Windows_10.iso only contains boot files and the boot.wim file):

\Start.exe
\CdUsb.Y
\autorun.cmd (optional)
\PortableApps
\Programs
\System (optional)

To save a key press or two in the E2B and agFM menus, you can rename the extension to _.isodef.iso.

Issues?

  • AntiVirus - MalwareBytes: UEFI64 does not seem to boot using Ventoy. Boots OK using agFM menu system and choosing .isowin or .isomap options however.
  • Some other Windows ISOs also seem to have problems. Try .isomap option in agFM.
  • Ventoy has problems with some payloads if testing using VirtualBox+VMUB but on a real system it usually works OK.
  • If you have intermittent problems when booting large ISOs, etc. then try a USB 2 port or connect a USB 2 extension cable to the E2B USB drive so that only USB 2 speeds are used instead of USB 3 speeds.
  • If you are using a USB 3 SSD device and experience problems, try using a USB Flash drive or USB spinning Hard Drive instead - I have seen some issues when booting some Linux distros (e.g. Slax) from a USB SSD (the USB drive is not detected by the kernel and  fdisk -l does not list the USB drive)!
  • To boot using agFM, you may require > 4GB of RAM in the system.
Recommended for E2B: SanDisk Extreme Pro 3.1 (#ad)


2 comments:

  1. Hi,

    just to be clear in case I selectively pick the ISO or WIM files from Medicat folders that I want, and add them into the existing E2B menu folders, then I don't have to copy any other files, right?

    This:

    "You will also need to copy the following files and folders to the root of the E2B NTFS partition #1:
    \Start.exe
    \CdUsb.Y
    \autorun.cmd (optional)
    \PortableApps
    \Programs
    \System (optional)"

    is needed only if we want to boot to Ventoy, right? Or will there be any issues?

    Thanks

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Only the medicat WinPE requires those files.
      \Start.exe and \PortableApps are needed if you want to run PortableApps from any of the WinPEs that you boot to, but that is up to you.

      Delete