5000+ free magazines

Just signed up to Readly (first month free - cancel if you don't like it!). It's the Spotify of mags! Not only can I view 1000s of mags for free, but I have access to back copies and I can search ALL of the mags for any mention of a key word or phrase (such as "easy2boot") and see all the pages which mention E2B in all mags! I am seriously considering cancelling all my current paper mag subscriptions! This is cheaper, faster and gives me access to way more mags. Only problem is that I might have to buy an iPad or Chromebook now...

P.S. I bought an Amazon Fire HD 10" (#ad). It is cheap and ideal for reading the mags/newspapers on. I installed Google Play store and then the Readly app.

agFM v1.56 now available

Anwar has discovered a bug where agFM (MBR grub2 only) can report a contiguous file as being non-contiguous.

agFM v1.56 - changes from v1.55 are...

1. SAMPLE_startup_menu.txt revised - now only shows 'Restore E2B Partitions' menu entry when the backup partition is a valid MBR.
2. Bugfix in agFM MBR code (grubfm.iso) to fix issue of some files reported as not contiguous (thanks to Anwar for reporting bug).
3. Latest agFM build with various bug-fixes.
4. Variable 'hires' (set hires=1) can now be set in your menu so that WinPE runs at highest screen resolution available (e.g. set in in startup_menu.txt). Setting this may cause virtual machines to default to their highest resolution but it should be OK to set the hires variable when booting from real systems.
5. The wimboot code has changed - do not specify bcd, boot.sdi or bootmgr files in wimboot command list as they are not needed. MBR\Legacy also uses the wimboot command now.
6. Ventoy modules have been removed by a1ive from agFM..

The new v1.56 version of E2B agFM can be found here. Just unzip the file directly onto the second FAT32 partition to update from v1.55.

The Update download is still 1.55 and will be updated in a few days to 1.56.

UEFI Secure Boot is in chaos!

As you may be aware, the agFM grub2 boot files which are added to the second FAT32 partition when you make an Easy2Boot v2 USB drive uses a Kaspersky shim to load the a1ive grub2 kernel.

Because the Kaspersky shim is signed, it means  that it can load the grub2 kernel which can then effectively disable Secure Boot!

This allows us to boot an insecure grub2 kernel and we can do pretty much anything we like to the system, including booting to non-secure OS's!

This loophole was reported to Microsoft last year (if not before!) and Microsoft tried to fix it using a Windows Update KB which was rolled out to all Windows 10 systems earlier this year. The 'hotfix' added an entry into the UEFI firmware dbx 'blacklist' of the BIOS. Thus the signed Kaspersky shim file was blacklisted by the UEFI BIOS.

Unfortunately, the KB hotfix caused problems with many systems because the same signed Kaspersky shim was used by some OEMs as standard - so these systems suddenly refused to Secure UEFI-boot after the Microsoft Update was applied!

So Microsoft quickly reversed the KB Kaspersky hotfix part in the next hotfix removed the blacklist dbx entry from the UEFI BIOS again. So - assuming you could get your system to non-secure boot by disabling Secure Boot in the BIOS, you could do a Windows Update and then re-enable Secure Boot again. Of course, your system would still be vulnerable though.

Since then it seems Microsoft, Linux developers and grub2 developers have actually bothered to look at and analyse the shims and grub2 code which they are getting signed and have found a large number of other vulnerabilities too!  To me this raises a number of questions about the Microsoft Secure Boot signing process:

1. What did Microsoft actually do when they signed Secure Boot files - just accept a huge amount of $$$ and sign any old boot file without bothering to fully analyse it?
2. Why does everyone insist that Open Source code is so desirable when there has been gaping security holes in grub2 for years?

A recent number of these vulnerabilities have now been fixed in grub2, but updating systems is not going to be easy! We cannot simply blacklist all current and older versions of grub2 by adding entries to the UEFI dbx blacklist. This would prevent any OS on older drives, backups, old install media, USB drives, PXE servers, etc. from Secure Booting because they would still contain the old, blacklisted, grub2 signed UEFI boot files. See the 'mitigation' section of this article for more details.

For the complete picture, read the whole article here.

Note also that very new linux/grub2 OS's (install ISOs and updates) may have these new 'fixes' added and it may prevent them from UEFI Secure booting and in some cases even non-Secure UEFI booting then fails!...

July 30 Important Update

Some of the Linux distribution updates appear to be leading to unsuccessful reboots. The developers and distribution maintainers are working to provide new updates. The maintainers are recommending to avoid installing updates for grub2, shim, and other bootloader-related applications until new packages are available. Some of the issues to watch are listed below:

• https://access.redhat.com/security/vulnerabilities/grub2bootloader
• https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1862045
• https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1861977
• https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/grub2/+bug/1889556
• https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=966554
• https://status.cloud.google.com/incident/compute/20009#20009005

Easy2Boot eBooks (PDFs) are now all $5

The E2B eBooks are now all reduced to only $5 each again. If you have not yet read all of them then now is your chance!

• E2B #1: How to make a multiboot USB drive using Easy2Boot
• E2B #2: How to install Microsoft Windows using Easy2Boot
• E2B #3: How to make a UEFI multi-boot Easy2Boot USB drive
• E2B #4: UEFI-multiboot using the a1ive grub2 File Manager 
• Getting started with grub4dos

There are some user comments\reviews on the E2B sites Guest Book page if you want to see what others thought of them.

Updates are free. Just use the download link that is emailed to you again to check for later versions.

re. Fixing faulty computers

This is just a quick blog post to say 'Hi'. I have been busy doing other things recently (like playing with my new IODD Mini SSD - Amazon link which is performing very well) so I have not been spending much time on E2B.

In my few moments of free time, I have been enjoying watching Adamant IT  repair shop YouTube videos which are quite entertaining. He has videos on 'live' repair and also 'live' PC builds as well as reviews, etc.

Although I have retired from repairing/building/developing PCs and Notebooks now, unless they have changed a lot in the last 6 years or so, I thought I would go through what I tended to do to diagnose and fix PCs\Notebooks.

Add Medicat 2020 to your Zalman\IODD disk

The Medicat 20.05 download comes as a .BIN file which contains a 512-byte header file which is only recognised by a few utilities such as OSFMounter and ImageUSB by Passmark.

Here is how to convert it to a VHD file which is suitable for loading via your Zalman\IODD device.

Note: For medicat.20.06.1.img - from here - I used BitTorrent and then just copied the .img file to my IODD\Zalman and renamed it to medicat.20.06.1.vhd. You can then mount it as a virtual drive.

Instructions for medicat 20.05  .bin file

COMSS 2020-06 multiboot ISO now available (Ru/Eng)

The COMSS 2020-06 multiboot utility ISO is now available. There is a Lite version and a 'full fat' version. The initial menu prompts you to select either Russian or English at the start.

New in version 2020-06:

Add the new 2020 Medicat to your E2B USB drive

The release of Medicat 20.05 is rather odd. It is intended that you make a Medicat 64GB or larger USB drive from it and it is not suitable for multibooting.

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

The new Medicat only supports 64-bit CPUs. It is based on Ventoy which requires two particular partitions in a specific order and the download is a PassMark .bin file which has a 512-byte header portion and so it cannot be treated as a VHD file or normal disk image file which we can use with a Zalman\IODD virtual drive emulator.

The main Medicat ISO is inside the image and contains the WinPE .wim file.
When Medicat boots, it will look for the USB drive and mount the USB drive as Y:.
It then expects to find program folders under Y:\Programs and the PortableApps programs under the Y:\PortableApps folder.

There are other ISOs within the image and Ventoy is used to boot them. We can extract these other ISO files from the .bin image and simply copy them to our E2B USB drive.

Medicat 20.06 is a .img file. It does not have the 512-byte header and can be renamed to .VHD for use with a Zalman\IODD. However it does not boot correctly as a .vhd using E2B and so must also be converted as below if using it on an 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 extract the files to an empty folder on your Windows hard disk and then decide which ISOs, etc. you want to copy to your E2B USB drive's first NTFS partition and choose the appropriate menu folder. Alternatively, 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. It will add lots of folders to the root however and may overwrite the contents of your \ventoy folder which will affect the Ventoy theme and menu settings.

Medicat 21.01 zip file contents

Instructions (v20.06)

E2B reaches 1/2 million downloads per year!

I just noticed today that since I started using Fosshub to host the E2B downloads in June 2019, the download counter for E2B has now reached over 500,000 downloads!

I can also tell that in the last 30 days, the Make_E2B.cmd file that is used to make a new E2B USB drive, has been run over 63,000 times (it downloads a file to notify the user of the latest version of E2B) and that the agFM UEFI files have been downloaded over 19,000 times in 30 days.

Boot any ISO from the IODD Mini USB SSD CD\DVD drive emulator

IODD Mini

The IODD Mini #ad  SSD CD\DVD drive emulator is a solid-state version of the IODD 2531 and 2541.

You can see from the picture below that it is approx 9cm x 4cm in size and will easily fit in a pocket.

Note: This IODD Mini was supplied to me by IODD for evaluation and feedback.

In fact, the white 1m USB 3 cable (micro-B USB 3 to Type A USB 3) that comes with it, is larger and bulkier than the device itself.