Thursday 21 January 2016

Problems UEFI-booting .imgPTN files - continued...

I have experimented some more with my Asus Z87 UEFI system and .imgPTN files, and it seems that the firmware will not provide the user with the UEFI boot option to UEFI-boot from an MBR-partitioned USB drive, if the partitions on that drive are out of order.

The Partition Table in the MBR (first sector) has 4 'slots' for 4 partition entries.

Each Partition Table entry has the following fields:
  • Drive number and Active/boot flag
  • Partition Type number (e.g. 0C = FAT32)
  • Start address of partition
  • Number of sectors in the partition
(there are also some parameters for old Cylinder/head/sector addressing).

Sunday 17 January 2016

Problems UEFI-booting .imgPTN files!!!

Since about E2B v1.73, if the second partition is a small hidden type 21h partition that is placed there by RMPartUSB when you use RMPrepUSB or the MAKE_E2B_USB_DRIVE.cmd script, this partition is not removed when you switch to a .imgPTN file - this is only done if the extension is exactly ".imgPTN" or ".imgPTNAUTO".

This was done because some Legacy BIOSes would recognise  the USB drive as a floppy disk and thus fail to boot grub4dos and boot to the CSM menu unless a 2nd partition was present (e.g. some EeePCs).

Friday 15 January 2016

Windows File Download problems - virus detected!

Windows 8/10 may not allow you to download files that it thinks are infected.


To be prompted to download it anyway, you need to change the Internet Properties setting:

You cannot download any file if the "File download" option is disabled in the Internet security settings. Follow these steps to check the Internet security settings:

E2B v1.76 RC1 available


  • SWITCH_E2B v1.0.6 with FlashBoot and WinToGo+.imgPTN support.
  • .isoBF fixed (did not work in 1.75!). 
  • Zorin 9 persistent sample .mnu files added. 
  • Fix for Zorin 9 in isoboot.g4b. 
  • New AuroraBin default wallpaper. 
  • Improve LZMA Encode/Decode scripts. 
  • Fix bug - if user deleted some of the Windows sub-folders  (e.g. \_ISO\WINDOWS\XP) then the other Windows sub-folders were not enumerated. 
  • Fix 'Trouble!' message if installing XP and >1 internal drive in system. 
  • New grub4dos 0.4.6a version \grldr. 
  • Add warning if Write-protected E2B USB drive found. 
  • Improve MAKE_E2B_USB_DRIVE to detect Removable USB drives and set NOHELPER=1 in MyE2B.cfg for faster boot if using a Removable E2B drive.

Monday 11 January 2016

Persistent .mnu file for Elementary OS

Elementary OS is a free download (you just enter 0 for Custom amount to pay - took me a while to figure that out!). If you actually like and use it though, please make a donation as requested.

Elementary OS with changed background (using persistence .mnu file)

Sunday 10 January 2016

Write-Protect your E2B USB drive

There has been a discussion on reboot.pro recently about how to write-protect a USB drive.

It is not advisable to hardware write-protect an E2B USB drive because E2B needs write-access to the MBR (to modify it) as well as needing to modify other files (e.g. \autounattend.xml, etc.). Some WinPE's and linux's (via ISOBOOT) may be able to boot from a write-protected E2B drive though. I intend to investigate this further at a later date, to see just what is possible if the whole E2B USB drive is hardware write-protected.

So the use of the write-protect switch on the Netac USB 3.0 U335 flash drive, for instance, is not a recommended option when booting from an E2B drive (although once it has booted to an OS from the flash drive, you could remove the USB drive - flip on the WP switch - and then re-insert it again and hope that it did not have enough time to get infected!).

Friday 8 January 2016

Sunday 3 January 2016

Display an animated picture in grub4dos

We can display bitmaps fairly quickly in grub4dos if we load them into memory first. This could allow us to display an animation sequence on first boot of E2B (move over Walt Disney!).

The lines below can be added into a \_ISO\MyE2B.cfg file to show 3 bitmaps in a loop until a key is pressed by the user. It is assumed that the bitmaps have a black background and are each exactly 800x600 in dimension.

Saturday 2 January 2016

Automatically use a different menu wallpaper for E2B

Change background based on the day of the week

Add the lines below to your \_ISO\MyE2B.cfg file (the first line should always be !BAT). Ensure that you have seven different .bmp.gz files in the \_ISO folder named Aurora0.bmp.gz to Aurora6.bmp.gz.

Friday 1 January 2016

E2B v1.76BetaF with GFX Boot menu maker script now available

I have added some files to E2B that will allow you to easily make and alter your own GFX Boot menus. It does not use a GUI, but is very easy to use.

For more details see the E2B GFX Boot page.

Thursday 31 December 2015

GFX Boot menu editor


Easy2Boot includes one example of a GFX Boot menu (\_ISO\docs\Templates\GFXMenu) which you can try out.

You can change the GFX menu by editing the \_ISO\MyE2B.cfg file and change the set GFX=message line (the file must be in the \_ISO folder).

If you want to design your own GFX Boot menu, I have added a download link for GFX-Boot Customizer utility by SBond here to make a GFX-BOOT.GFX file to the GFX Menu page on the E2B website.

Make a Windows 10 To Go Removable USB Flash drive (MBR and UEFI)

Windows To Go allows you to boot from a USB drive, but Windows 8.1 and Windows 10 will not allow you to boot from a 'flat file' installation on a Removable USB drive.

You can MBR boot Win 10 from a Removable USB Flash drive if you use a VHD to contain the Windows system files however.

But what about UEFI-booting? We cannot have more than one partition visible to Windows on a Removable USB drive, but for UEFI, we need a FAT32 partition which is not able to hold the large VHD file.

Here is how to set up a non-GPT Removable Windows To Go Flash drive so it will MBR and UEFI-boot:

Note that if you use an x64 version of Windows, you will only be able to UEFI-boot from it on 64-bit UEFI systems. If you have a 32-bit UEFI system, use a 32-bit version of Windows.

Monday 28 December 2015

Christmas Edition E2B v1.76BetaE available

  • SWITCH_E2B v1.0.6 with FlashBoot and WinToGo+.imgPTN support. 
  • .isoBF now fixed (did not work in 1.75!). 
  • Zorin 9 persistent .mnu files added. 
  • Fix for Zorin 9 in isoboot.g4b. 
  • AuroraSanta default wallpaper. 'Dustbin' wallpaper in \_ISO\e2b\grub folder if you want it!
  • Improve LZMA Encode/Decode scripts. 
  • Fix bug - if user deleted some of the Windows sub-folders then the other remaining Windows sub-folders were not enumerated and so no Windows Install menu entry was present in the Main menu.
Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year :-)

Wednesday 23 December 2015

How to make large files contiguous on an E2B USB drive

As you know, most files on the E2B USB drive need to be contiguous (one exception to this is the Windows Installer ISO files).

The easiest way to make all files contiguous is to click on the \MAKE_THIS_DRIVE_CONTIGUOUS.cmd batch file which runs WinContig.

Tip: If you don't use the CONTIG.ISO temporary file (only used by E2B when files are non-contiguous), then just delete it. This will add an extra 500MB of free space.

BUT - Do you ever find that one or two large files cannot be made contiguous by WinContig?

You may find that, even though there is enough free space on the drive to make a copy of the file, WinContig (and Defraggler) cannot make the file contiguous. This is because the 'free space' is scattered all over the drive volume instead of being all in one 'chunk'.

Motasem discovered this yesterday and contacted me for advice. Here is how you can fix the problem...

Tuesday 22 December 2015

Why not customise your E2B - be inspired by Laura's (German) E2B themes!

Laura recently contacted me to submit a few E2B Menu screenshots to the E2B Gallery page.

Her web site is in German (although she is Spanish) and can be found at www.1910.eu. It contains loads of lovely example E2B menus (including custom CSM menus) and she has offered her help and will answer any questions you may have!

Sunday 20 December 2015

Boot from a linux disk image with grub4dos\Easy2Boot

I came across the HDDGURU wipemydisks disk image yesterday (wipemydisks1.1.img). This is a complete linux disk image with a bootable MBR and partition table and was designed to be written to a USB drive using dd or a disk imaging program (e.g. RMPrepUSB - File -> Disk).

I wanted to try to add this to Easy2Boot and so experimented with a way of booting to it.

Thursday 17 December 2015

New Switch_E2B.exe v1.0.6 available

There have been some recent changes to Switch_E2B.exe

  1. Bugfix - When E2B switches to a .imgPTN file, it changes the Disk Signature bytes (four bytes starting at 1b8h in the MBR) to be the same as the start LBA position of the .imgPTN file. This ensures the 'new' partition arrangement also has a new disk signature. Switch_E2B.exe did not change these Disk Signature bytes. This meant that if you had a BCD inside your .imgPTN file which used the disk signature to identify the USB disk, if you switched to the .imgPTN file using Switch_E2B.exe, it would not boot to Windows due to a mismatched BCD and Disk Signature. This has now been fixed in Switch_E2B.exe.
  2. If you made a FAT32 E2B USB drive using flashboot, Switch_E2B would not recognise it.
  3. If you had a large E2B USB HDD which contained thousands of files, it could take Switch_E2B a long time (20+ seconds) to search the whole volume for all .imgPTN files. The new version only searches under the \_ISO folder by default. To search the whole drive volume, you now need to untick the 'Only search \_ISO folder' checkbox.


Thursday 10 December 2015

Get Windows 10 for free!

The new Windows 10 Threshold 2 release allows you to use a Win7 or Win8 Product Key to perform a clean install of Windows 10 and activate it.

If you have an unused 'Retail' Windows 7 Product Key (perhaps you ordered a Win 7 Install DVD + Product Key a few years ago) then you can use the same Win 7 Product Key to install Windows 10 (on the same system).

Note: This will probably not work after 2017-12-31 - see here.

Saturday 5 December 2015

SWITCH_E2B v1.0.4 available (compatible with FlashBoot)

It was reported to me that SWITCH_E2B did not work on E2B USB flash drives that had been formatted using FlashBoot, so I have now made version 1.0.3 available for those of you that use FlashBoot with E2B. If you use FlashBoot, you can update your E2B drives and your MPI installation ( the MPI .\csm\e2b folder) with the new version of SWITCH_E2B.exe.

Update: v1.0.3 only worked if the volume name was kept as 'FLASBOOT'.
v1.0.4 should now work with any volume name.

If you often find yourself needing to USB boot from older systems a lot (e.g. repair shop), you should check out FlashBoot!

E2B drives prepared using FlashBoot should boot on a wider variety of systems, especially older systems with early (buggy) USB BIOSes that try to boot USB drives as a floppy disk or USB ZIP drive instead of as a hard disk.

If a BIOS boots from a USB Flash drive as a floppy/ZIP drive instead of a hard disk, this causes grub4dos to fail to boot. If you use RMPrepUSB\RMPartUSB to format the USB drive, it adds a second small hidden partition and this often helps to avoid the 'boot as floppy' problem - but not always!

If you prepare your USB Flash drive with FlashBoot, you may find that it will boot on some of these older systems that would not boot from a 'normal' E2B drive.

However, there are some drawbacks to using a drive that has been formatted with FlashBoot:
  1. You have to format the USB drive as FAT32 with FlashBoot (NTFS is not supported). So this limits your maximum file size to 4GB. FlashBoot is not limited to creating 32GB partitions however and will work with both large USB hard disks and removable flash drives.
  2. You cannot reboot to the CSM Menu once you switch into any .imgPTN partition image. You can boot to the E2B menu, switch to a .imgPTN menu and then run the CSM Menu, however you cannot reboot to the CSM menu (a fresh boot) because the code in the MBR is specific to FlashBoot and it expects a partition to be present which contains FlashBoot boot code and not the 'normal' .imgPTN image partition that has been switched in.
FlashBoot is a commercial product (25 Euros), but you can try it for free for a limited period and see if it works on your 'difficult' old systems before you buy the full version.

P.S. You can also try out the Emergency Boot CD (EBCD) .ISO download too!

Saturday 28 November 2015

E2B v1.75BetaH available with Windows Server 2016 support + bugfixes

In E2B v1.75BetaH I have added a new \_ISO\WINDOWS\SVR2016 folder for the upcoming Server 2016 release. It uses the 'Win8 install' grub4dos batch file and so allows you to specify a Product Key or XML file in the same way as for Win8 ISOs.

Please test it out and feed back any comments (steve at easy2boot dot com), as I intend to make this the new v1.75 release version soon.

Monday 23 November 2015

Trouble with Windows 10 Threshold 2 ISOs and E2B?

A few weeks ago I downloaded an MSDN Windows 10 Threshold 2 preview of Enterprise and found that when the blue console (LOADISO) window ran (booting from a Removable E2B USB drive and using the .ISO file), ImDisk did not mount the ISO as drive Y:. This was repeatable but only that ISO gave a problem.

I reported this issue to Olof (the author of ImDisk), but a few days later when I tried to reproduce the problem I found that it worked OK and could not reproduce the problem!

A few days ago, an E2B user reported to me that he had MSDN and Retail versions of the latest Win10 Threshold 2 released ISOs and had encountered the same problem with all the new ISOs (older ISOs worked OK) using E2B v1.74.

I suspected that perhaps a different version of WinPE was being used in his ISOs (maybe because they were MSDN versions?) and updated ImDisk on E2B (v.1.75BetaC).

However, the same user then reported that the ISOs were now magically working with E2B v1.74 when he retested them!  A clear case of Deja Vu!

If you find a similar issue, please comment on this blog or contact me. There is something weird going on, but I am not sure where?

Friday 20 November 2015

MPI Tool Kit 0.056 available for Windows 10 Threshold 2 systems

0.056 is the same as 0.055 but has the new version of ImDisk.
If you are using Windows 10 Threshold 2, you will need to download this and run .\ImDisk\imdiskinst.exe to install the new version of ImDisk to make the MakePartImage scripts work again.

Tuesday 17 November 2015

New ImDisk version for new Windows 10 release now available

Olof has released a new version of ImDisk.

I will update the MPI Tool Kit in a day or so. Meanwhile you can install the new ImDisk and then check that MPI works on the new 'Threshold 2' version of Windows 10.

Saturday 14 November 2015

MakePartImage problems with Windows 10?

If you are using Windows 10 and now suddenly find that you get an error when running MakePartImage (MPI) and cannot create .imgPTN files any more, it is probably because Windows Update has updated you to the latest version of Windows 10!


The original Win10 version is 10240, but the new (large) update called Threshold 2 is Version 1511 Build 10586. You can check your version by using the [Windows+R] key chord and run WinVer.exe.



You can update to the new version or download an ISO from here. Microsoft will soon enable the auto-update to Threshold 2 on all systems.

Olof is working on a new version of ImDisk to fix this issue and I will release a new version of the MPI Tool Kit when the new ImDisk becomes available.

Update: New ImDisk version for Win10 1511 from Olof here.


Friday 13 November 2015

Easy2Boot v1.75 Beta B available


  • .imgPTN files now supported in all \_ISO\WINDOWS\xxxx folders (except XP)
  • new .isoBF file extension supported (permanently patches an ISO to remove the bootfix.bin file and so suppress the 'Press a key to boot from CD\DVD' message)
  • new .vhdgrldr file extension supported (boots a vhd file which uses a grub4dos menu or PBR boot code)
For info on the two new file extensions, see this page.

The main change is that if you have converted a Windows Install ISO to a .imgPTN file, you can now add these to the \_ISO\WINDOWS\xxxx folders and they will be listed in the appropriate Windows sub-menu alongside any ISOs you may also have present. You do not need to have any Windows Install .ISO files present if you don't use them.

The only exception is that XP Install .imgPTN files are not supported and so should not be added to the \_ISO\WINDOWS\XP folder (they will not be listed in the Windows Install menu). If you have any XP Install .imgPTN files, you should add them to a 'normal' menu folder - e.g. \_ISO\MAINMENU or \_ISO\WIN.

You can use a .txt file for .imgPTN menu entries in these folder in the same way as you can for normal folders.

You can now place your .imgPTN Windows Install files in the \_ISO\WINDOWS folders as well as .ISO files

Saturday 7 November 2015

Add Win-UFO (Ultimate Forensic Outflow) to your toolkit

The Win-UFO download is a single .exe file which asks you which location to install to when you first run it. Actually it does NOT install anything to Windows, it merely extracts files to the designated location. There is a PDF manual file to download and which I suggest you study first before using Win-UFO and some YouTube videos.
 Win-UFO is now associated with CAINE.

Friday 6 November 2015

E2B v1.74 released (fixes the firadisk.cmd copy bug with XP ISO installs)

It seems I made a typo in the grub4dos batch file \_ISO\e2b\grub\DPMS\DPMS2.g4b in E2B v1.73 which means that when you try to install from an XP ISO, you will get a 'cannot copy firadisk.cmd' error reported at the start of the file-copy phase in text-mode Setup and need to 'Skip' the file.
This is fixed in v1.74.
Thanks to watsupson for reporting it!

Thursday 5 November 2015

Windows Defender is deleting SWITCH_E2B.exe!

BEWARE: The latest definitions update for Windows Defender seems to think SWITCH_E2B.exe is a malicious file and promptly deletes it!
VirusTotal does not find any problems with it and, of course, it is not malicious!
You may find that this file has suddenly disappeared, now you know why!
Thanks to Steven L for pointing this out!

New Gandalf WinPE, XP SP3 install ISO and Dreams Boot CD 2015

This post covers:

  • New Gandalf Windows 10 64-bit WinPE ISO
  • Windows XP 'Gold 2016' install ISO
  • Dreams Boot CD 2015 (DLCD) ISO