MPI Tool Kit v0.067 released plus E2B v1.82h Beta available

The MPI Tool Kit now supports a MyCSM.cfg menu configuration file, so that you can use the E2B_Editor GUI utility to design your own custom CSM menu. It also supports GFXBoot menus. You can add files to the CUSTOM folder in the MPI Tool Kit and any .imgPTN file you make in future will have your custom menu. For instructions, see here. Download from the Alternate Download Areas.

Sample MyCSM.cfg file with (nasty-but-small-file-size) pink jpeg wallpaper.

Also, E2B 1.82h Beta is released. It includes the latest grub4dos 0.4.6a which has three bugfixes and SDI_CHOCO. This is a 'release candidate' and will be fully released as the official v1.82 in a few days - please try it and feedback if you find any issues. SDI_CHOCO allows you to easily completely automate the installation of Windows 8.1 or 10 using an unaltered Microsoft Install ISO and automatically install drivers, Windows Updates and applications.

P.S. If you have previously donated or contributed in other ways to E2B and don't like the new Easy2Boot website page format (and all the ads!), please contact me for a way to get the original www.easy2boot.com site layout.

No-More-Ransom - A useful Anti-Ransomware website

www.nomoreransom.org looks like a useful anti-ransomware site where you can find decryption tools, information and advice.

The “No-More-Ransom” website is an initiative by the National High Tech Crime Unit of the Netherlands’ police, Europol’s European Cybercrime Centre and two cyber security companies – Kaspersky Lab and Intel Security – with the goal to help victims of ransomware retrieve their encrypted data without having to pay the criminals.

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Upgrading Win7 to Win10 still works! + weird 'Unable to install Windows to the hard disk' issue solved.

I was playing around with PSUs yesterday and temporarily 'borrowed' the PSU from my old Dell Inspiron 530 to test it with another system.

Dell Inspiron 530

After confirming that it worked on the other system, I replaced it back in the Dell 530 when I realised that the 250GB hard disk in the Dell was actually running Windows 7 (the Dell was originally installed with Vista, but I later installed Windows 7 Ultimate many years ago using a Retail product key).

I decided this would be a good chance to see if the Windows 10 Upgrade offer was still working, so I booted from my E2B drive (an Inateck FE2007) to a Windows 10 Pro TH2 VHD, typed in the Windows 7 Product Key (which I had obtained using ShowKeyPlus previously) - and voila! I had one activated Windows 10 Pro system.

So as of 2016-08-05, I can confirm that you can still use a Win7 retail product key to activate Windows 10.

Problems installing Windows 10!

I decided to do a fresh install of Windows 10 from an ISO file using my E2B hard disk (FE2007 + Samsung SSD) and a 'Helper' USB flash drive. As you may know, if E2B is on a hard disk, we need to add a Removable USB drive so that Windows will 'pick up' the AutoUnattend.xml file from the Removable drive during Setup and that we can make ImDisk run and load the ISO as a virtual DVD drive. The FE2007 hard disk enclosure has three USB 3.0 ports built in, so the flash drive is always connected to the E2B hard disk.

So, I booted to E2B and selected the Windows 10 ISO (actually the latest 'Anniversary' version) and got to the Disk\Partition selection screen as usual. BUT I then got stuck on a problem - Setup refused to install Windows onto the internal hard disk!

Every time I got the message:  'We couldn't create a new partition or locate an existing partition'.

Easy2Boot v1.82g Beta available

This v1.82g Beta includes SDI_CHOCO and the new grub4dos (beta) version which fixes the "E2B.cfg missing" error which a handful of users have experienced on certain systems containing certain partitions.

I have also renamed the E2B Win8 and Win10 XML files. When you perform an E2B Update, it will delete the old v1.81 XML files and add the new ones. If you have previously installed an SDI_CHOCO beta, I suggest you first delete all the old .XML files (that are E2B ones) and then do an Update.

As usual the download is available in the Alternate Download Areas.

Any feedback welcome.

Has the free Windows 10 upgrade really finished?

According to a Martin Brinkman blog post here, you can still get the free Win10 upgrade.
If this is true, can you also do a clean install of Win10 and use a Win7 or Win8 Product Key? Presumably the same activation process will still work as before and the trick of simply booting from a USB drive to Win10 will still work.

P.S. 2016-08-05 I booted to Win10 TH2 Pro on a Windows 7 Ultimate system today and used the Windows 7 Ult key to activate it - it worked fine!

grub4dos - good news, very good news and not so good news!

YaYa has fixed two bugs in grub4dos 0.4.6a

1. Issue #122 - Replacing strings in a file using cat --locate=xxx --replace=yyy sometimes didn't work
2. Issue #119 - grub4dos crashes when it access certain partitions (this is the “\_ISO\e2b\grub\E2B.cfg is MISSING!” issue)

Bug #122 has a workaround and this has been added into E2B v1.82 so that we can use older versions of grub4dos if we need to (useful for testing different versions, etc.). The bug was only found due to the new SDI_CHOCO feature in v1.82 and so did not affect previous versions of E2B.

Bug #119 is great news. Many people have helped in investigating this bug but a special thanks to Norbert who spent a lot of time to prepare a Virtual Machine in VBox which allowed the developer (YaYa) to see the problem and enabled him to fix it!

The not so good news, is that I discovered a new bug to do with certain types (joliet?) of XP ISOs crashing when accessed (e.g. using a cat command on a file inside the ISO). The bug report is Issue #123 and affects grub4dos 0.4.6a versions after 2016-04-10 (so does affect E2B v1.81 which used 2016-07-04 and E2B v1.80 which used 2016-04-26, but not E2B v1.79 which used 2016-03-26). A genuine MS XP3 ISO does not seem to be affected though and it only seems to happen with some ISOs on some systems (TBD). Hopefully, YaYa can find the problem and fix it. Then we will have a new version of grub4dos with all the major outstanding bugs fixed.

2016-08-04 - YaYa has fixed the bug. Next version should have all fixes!

Add Parted Magic 2016 with SAVE feature to E2B

Here is the .mnu file for the PMagic 2016 ISO with the SAVE feature supported.

SDI_CHOCO page now added to E2B website

The SDI_CHOCO feature allows you to fully automate a Windows install + install drivers + applications + Windows updates completely unattended.

Once you have it set up, when a new version of Windows is released, just copy the new Windows Install ISO onto your E2B USB drive and use that instead of the old ISO! No need to change anything else.

See here for details.

You can have multiple configurations for different systems or configurations. You can install your own custom drivers or applications too.

For instance, a full Windows 10 installation with drivers and a few applications can take about 12 minutes from first boot to the E2B USB drive to the final user Desktop (watch the video).

Hope it is not too confusing!

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How to activate Windows 8/10 automatically

You can use the following cmd script to get the OEM key which has been programmed into the BIOS by the manufacturer and then activate Windows with it automatically. Of course, the OS must match the OEM key (e.g. Windows Home OS <> Windows Home Product Key).

AutoActivate.cmd  (run as admin)

@echo off
pushd "%~dp0"
set PKEY=
get_win8key.exe > WINKEY.txt
set /p PKEY=<WINKEY.txt
if not "%PKEY%"=="" (
echo Activating using key %PKEY%
cscript //NoLogo %systemroot%\system32\slmgr.vbs /ipk %PKEY% > act.log
cscript //NoLogo %systemroot%\system32\slmgr.vbs /ato >> act.log
type act.log
)

popd

get_win8key.exe can be obtained from here. It also works on Windows 10 systems.

P.S. after downloading get_win8key.exe - right-click on the file - Properties - and tick UnBlock. Otherwise Windows Powershell may refuse to run it.

How to automate the installation of Windows and Lenovo drivers using SDI_CHOCO

Here is how I modified SDI_CHOCO on my E2B drive so that instead of using Snappy to install generic drivers, it installs all the correct official Lenovo drivers and applications.

New user files are created by the end user to modify the install behaviour, so updating E2B to the latest version will not delete these new files because only the original E2B files are updated.

If you have several different models of PCs and Notebooks to install, then the XML file and SDI_CHOCO folder structure should be duplicated, renamed and modified accordingly, for each different model.