Tuesday 6 February 2024

E2B is the only SecureBoot multiboot solution which does not modify your UEFI BIOS!

These days, many PCs and Notebooks only have UEFI boot support.

If you wish to use a multiboot solution such as Ventoy, you must either disable Secure Boot (if you can get into the BIOS) or use Ventoy's MOK Manager shim to change the UEFI BIOS so that will accept the unsigned Ventoy EFI boot file (which then makes it insecure).

However, E2B allows us to switch in any partition image and boot to it. So as long as that image contains signed boot files (as in Windows or Ubuntu, etc.) then we can Secure Boot from that image.

I have added a page to the easy2boot.xyz website here in case you were not aware. There are many ways of supporting multiple Secure Boot images on an E2B USB drive and in this example I have used HBCD_PE as the secure OS. From HBCD_PE we can switch in any OS image file.

  1. Secure Boot to WinPE on the FAT32 Partition 3 of the E2B USB drive
  2. Switch into Partition 1 a new partition image file (e.g. Windows Install, Ubuntu, etc.)
  3. Secure Boot from  the new image now in Partition 1, after this...
  4. Secure Boot to WinPE on the FAT32 Partition 3 of the USB drive
  5. Restore the original E2B Partition 1

Since we are booting from a FAT32 partition 1 on the USB drive, UEFI BIOSes should not have any compatibility issues. The Secure Boot boot files on the partition are unaltered and thus Secure Boot should always work even with the fussiest BIOSes!

Instead of HBCDPE, you can use any WinPE that supports 32-bit applications (has WoW64), such as Strelec or DLC or Bob Omb's WinPE.


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