E2B v1.56aBeta11 update

Seems to be a small incompatibility in the new grub4dos which affect calculations involving the shift >> operator. This has the affect that E2B reports the memory size incorrectly in the Main menu heading when using the new version of grub4dos.
I have updated some .g4b batch files to fix the issue so that it should work with both old and new versions. The issue is reported here.
Thanks to Simone for reporting it (I didn't notice!).

Easy2Boot v1.56a Beta 10 now available

This version has a few changes (CheckAccess.g4b has been tweaked) and the latest versions (at last!) of grub4dos (both 0.4.5c and 0.4.6a).
Please let me know if you experience any problems.
If you see an 'OLD GRUB4DOS VERSION' message, be sure to update the \grldr file with the version in the 1.56aBeta10 download.
The download is in the Alternate Download Areas accessible from the Downloads page as usual.
To update, just unzip the file to the root of your USB drive as usual.

Unless there are any problems reported, this version will be the official 'release' version of 1.56 in a few days.

E2B v1.56aBeta9 now has a Windows 10 menu

The Windows 10 technical preview ISO could be installed from E2B by adding it to the \_ISO\WINDOWS\WIN8 folder and using the correct Product Key, however I have added a new \_ISO\WINDOWS\WIN10 folder to E2B now so that any new Windows 10 ISOs can be kept in their own folder and have their own menu.

The download is available in the Alternate Download Areas as usual.

1.56a will be released as soon as chenall has time to fix a bug in grub4dos so that I can release it with the latest version of grub4dos.

FakeFlashTest v1.1.1 now available

This version of FFT allows you to list all drives in the system (including internal hard drives - dangerous!).

Some users have reported that v1.0.9 did not list their SD Card Readers as they were not USB devices. This new version gets round this problem if the user ticks the List all drives checkbox.

Take care not to destroy the data on your internal hard disks!

Download is at the bottom of this page.

32-bit UEFI booting using E2B

It seems quite a few people want use E2B to try linux and other OS's on their 32-bit UEFI-only Tablets. Some Intel Atom-based Tablets are 32-bit UEFI only (even if the Atom CPU itself is a 64-bit CPU).

The first thing they find is that when they try E2B on these UEFI-only devices, it just boots and runs MemTest86 because they have formatted the E2B drive as FAT32 and E2B includes Memtest86 in the form of the bootable UEFI files \EFI\boot\bootx64.efi (for 64-bit UEFI systems) and \EFI\boot\bootia32.efi (for 32-bit systems).

If they have formatted the E2B USB drive as NTFS, then of course, it will not UEFI-boot at all because the default bootable filesystem must be FAT/FAT32 for UEFI systems.

The next thing I have to explain, is that they need to make a FAT32 .imgPTN file of their 'payload' and make sure that the correct .efi boot file is present.

The problem is that if the user's Tablet is a 32-bit UEFI system (that does not support CSM\MBR mode) then they need to find an OS that is 32-bit UEFI bootable - and there are not many of these around!

Clonezilla zip files (e.g. clonezilla-live-2.2.4-12-i686-pae.zip) seem to contain both 32-bit and 64-bit EFI files and so will boot from both a 64-bit and 32-bit UEFI system. For this reason, I always recommend that a new user tests UEFI-booting with this first (after converting it to a .imgPTN file).

The only other OS or utility I have been able to find (other than Memtest86) that supports 32-bit UEFI-booting is Fedora-17-i686-Live-SoaS.iso (note: version 20 does not seem to support 32-bit UEFI booting). Parted Magic also supports 32-bit and 64-bit UEFI-booting.

If you know of any others ('live' CDs, etc.) , please let me know and I will add it to the list of tested payloads on my E2B site so that others can try them.

Note: If they are 32-bit UEFI bootable, then they will contain the \EFI\boot\bootia32.efi file (amongst others). If they don't contain that file then they won't boot from an E2B USB drive on a 32-bit UEFI system.

If you have a 32-bit UEFI-only system, you won't be able to boot the E2B USB drive to get to the E2B menu and select the .imgPTN file. You therefore need to boot the E2B USB drive in MBR-mode in another way first. You can use RMPrepUSB - QEMU (F11), or MobaLiveCD.exe or VMWare or VirtualBox to do this (or another real system that will MBR-boot).

As soon as you get to the CSM menu after selecting the desired .imgPTN file, you can then boot from the E2B USB drive on your 32-bit UEFI Tablet.

You can switch it back to the E2B menu is the same way, or you can run the RestoreE2B (run as admin).cmd file which is located on the E2B drive's \e2b folder (when in CSM mode) from Windows. This file can also be run from the MPI ToolKit folder that you downloaded (RMPrepUSB should be pre-installed).

Instructions (found by Karan) for booting Ubuntu from the Asus T100 are here. Karan found that he could copy the bootia32.efi file from here to a Ubuntu 14.04 64-bit .imgPTN file (\EFI\boot\bootia32.efi) and his Intel Atom system booted. I suspect this will only work if your firmware is 32-bit UEFI but your CPU is 64-bit though, like Karan's Notion Ink CN89553G.

How to retrieve files from a computer without booting it to an OS (via PXE)!

I needed to get some files from the internal hard disk of a notebook recently. The problem was that it had no CD/DVD drive and would not boot from a USB drive or the internal hard drive either!

I could have removed the internal hard disk from the notebook, but then I remembered about a Tutorial I had written using Toolwiz Remote Backup. It seems this is still available (free) and has been updated too.

This utility allowed me to PXE boot from the notebook and then look at the internal hard disk partition and retrieve files from it within 1 minute of installing it onto my other Windows system. It is really easy to use too.

A useful utility to add to your toolkit!

E2B 1.56aBeta1 available

Still waiting for a bugfix in grub4os, but meanwhile I have added latest Beta to the Alternate Download areas.
For changes see here.
Let me know if you find any problems.

Bug in E2B 1.55 & 1.56beta (XP installs)

E2B v1.55 uses a version of grub4dos which has a bug. If you try to install XP from an ISO using DPMS, then XP Setup complains that it cannot detect any disks! This bug appears to start in grldr 2014-08-19 and later versions but is not in 2014-08-17 and earlier versions. I have reported this to chenall and hopefully he can find the problem.  If you have a later version, you can replace the \grdlr file with the 2014-08-17 version of 0.4.5c from http://grub4dos.chenall.net/categories/downloads/.

Please update to v1.55a or 1.56a.

Note: As of 2014-09-19 I am still having weird issues with grub4dos later versions (e.g. losing USB drive, not enumerating all items, hanging).

P.S. 20141027 and later seem OK.

Bug in E2B v1.56 (in grub4dos)

It seems something is broken in the new version of grub4dos!
If using XP Install and DPMS, you will get a FAT disk I/O error.
I have withdrawn v1.56 until chenall can fix grub4dos.
You can replace \grldr with the 2014-08-17 version if you like, but E2B v1.56 will complain about it being too old.

E2B v1.56 released

PLEASE NOTE: Discovered a bug in the new grub4dos version! I have withdrawn v1.56 until a grub4dos is fixed! Please use v1.55 for now.

Changes in 1.56

• New grub4dos \grldr (20140908) fixes exFAT bug with >4GB files + other small bugs
• CPU 32/64 bit & Total memory displayed in Main Menu heading and Windows Install menu
• New Sample mnu Files examples. 
• Weird characters such as ()!''&| may now work if used in Windows ISO and .imgPTN filenames.
• 'Boot any key to boot from CD or DVD' Windows install prompt suppressed. 
• Default Aurora background compressed using lzma (reduced size). 
• .iso64 family of file extensions recognised (only listed if 64-bit CPU). 
• Fastload menu has changed (only seen if FASTLOAD is enabled) - now press F8 to refresh the menu instead of the separate REFRESH entry. 
• Change Automn.g4b and Automn.g4b to use 56MB area of memory instead of 74MB area so can use E2B on systems with 64MB of memory or more.

Let me know if you spot any problems. The F1.cfg Help menu is in English in all languages and also some of the new text in STRINGS.txt (see end of file). Any translations welcome!