Steve's blog about RMPrepUSB, Easy2Boot and USB booting and sometimes other stuff too!
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I do not intend to continually patch and recompile Ventoy every few days so that it can be added to E2B, however if you want to know how I made my own version, I have written up some notes here.
My knowledge of C is limited and I am not very experienced with Linux, so please correct me if any of the instructions are wrong or maybe inaccurate!
I have also slightly modified the wallpaper in my new version of Ventoy_1.0.29_windows.zip now to make it obvious that it is not the official Ventoy version - can you tell?
Drag-and-drop the zip file onto the \e2b\Update e2b\Add_Ventoy.cmd file.
After installing it using that .cmd file, you will need to download the v1.0.29 patched version of core.img from here and overwrite the \ventoy\core.img file with this new version - otherwise MBR-booting will be blocked.
I have not changed its appearance, so please don't report any problems to the Ventoy forum unless you can reproduce the same issue on a genuine Ventoy USB drive!
The MBR version appears to say 'Unofficial Ventoy' but the UEFI version does not display that text message.
This version is temporary and for Beta testing only. I do not intend to maintain a forked version of Ventoy for E2B.
LongPanda (the developer of Ventoy) has changed Ventoy so that it will only work on MBR-partitioned disks if that disk was prepared using the official Ventoy tools. The second partition must be exactly 65536 sectors long now.
Recently, I received some special error reports, which finally proved to be the cause of the non-standard Ventoy environment. Especially use Ventoy in a single partition environment. Although Ventoy displays Unofficial's label information, users will not care and will still think it is a Ventoy problem.
Ventoy has been an overall design from the beginning, and has not considered integration into other bootloader or partition environments.
Ventoy's verification and subsequent development of new features will not consider this non-standard usage.
Therefore, I decided to prohibit the use of Ventoy in a non-standard environment and no longer accept requests for deregulation.
Of course, this is just the default behavior of Ventoy. Ventoy is still 100% open source. If you want to apply Ventoy in your own environment, you can fork a branch and modify the source code implementation.
This means that v1.0.28 (and all future versions?) will not run from an E2B drive.
If you would like to be able to continue to add Ventoy to E2B, please feel free to contact LongPanda and request that he changes his mind!
For now you need to use 1.0.27 (see here for details).
For the changes in Ventoy which check the partitions for validity - see the new code here (starting line 509).
If you wish, you can run the newer versions of Ventoy using MBR-booting only by using an older version of core.img, however UEFI-booting to Ventoy will still be blocked.
Footnote (2021): I have now recompiled Ventoy as 'Ventoy for Easy2Boot' with the restrictive code removed. Also, you can easily convert an E2B USB drive into an official Ventoy USB drive (original unmodified Ventoy) by making three different image files of 'official' Ventoy from the latest build of Ventoy and 'switching' one of them into Partition 2 (uses Ventoy grub2 boot code too).
The old v2.06 Make_E2B_USB_Drive.cmd had a typo in the URL to get the LatestVersion.txt file from the server. This caused a 3-5 second delay and the latest version was not displayed. v2.06A fixes this issue. Since it is a minor issue, this version is still called 2.06.
MAKE_E2B_USB_DRIVE should now be v4.40 in E2B 2.06A.
Well, the UK is in Covid Lockdown for a month so I am reading lots of autobiographies which I buy second-hand from Amazon. I am interested in reading about the life of entrepreneurs (e.g. some of the stars in 'Dragons Den', Alan Sugar, etc.), scientists (e.g. Richard Feynman) and engineers (e.g. 'Woz') - amongst many others.
If I had my way, all high-schools should have these types of books on the English Lit. curriculum. They are so inspiring and are much more valuable to any young person than 'Catcher in the Rye' or Shakespeare ever could be. They teach you about real life, proper work ethics and how to take calculated chances when necessary. If you know anyone who is stuck in a 9-5 job and is always moaning about it - then why not give them a good autobiography for Xmas!
It has always been my philosophy in life to do my very best in any job I find myself in. I can remember working as a fruit picker at the age of 16 one summer (piecework!) and cycling 3 miles to the orchards at 6.30am each morning, working all day and cycling home completely exhausted at 6 pm, so tired I could hardly move - BUT I picked just as many apples\pears\plums as the 'professional' itinerant workers did and after a few weeks I was promoted to a group 'supervisor'.
I was talking to a young boy the other day and he was complaining about having to do very menial tasks around the office where he had just started a temporary job. He had the attitude that it was beneath him - he was not doing a very thorough job and so was getting moaned at by his boss. I pointed out that if HE was an employer and he had one employee like him and another employee that always did the same job perfectly (or even improved on the end result), which one would he pick to promote? Why would he promote someone who could not even do simple tasks well? Equally, if one of his staff constantly showed that they had good organisational skills, clever ideas, always on time, polite, well presented, worked late and never complained - wouldn't he feel that he had to promote them or else risk losing a valuable asset?
At the moment, I am half-way through Richard Branson's very large autobiography 'Losing my virginity' (#Amazon ad link) and am very much enjoying it, having lived through those times (the late 60s onwards) as a teenager/young man. The person who said 'If you can remember the ’60s, you really weren’t there' was probably right - especially if you were a student! I am certainly surprised Richard Branson can remember it all after reading about his recreational experiences in the book (or perhaps he made a few of the things up just to fill in the gaps!).
Richard Branson was apparently hopeless at school and severely dyslexic (especially with maths). He hardly had two O-levels to rub together but he worked hard, told lots of (small) lies to get started in business, took calculated risks and looked after his staff as best he could.
I am just at the part in his autobiography where Branson states that the initial instrument list that Mike Oldfield requested for recording his album (now known as 'Tubular Bells'), actually included tubular bells. However, in the YT video (below), Mike Oldfield implies that their inclusion was serendipitous - he happened to see them being removed from Virgin's Manor recording studio by the previous band and spontaneously asked for them to be taken back inside because he could probably make use of them.. but maybe your take is different...
Our USA cousins may only recognise Tubular Bells as the music that was in 'The Exorcist', but in my day you had to immediately go out and buy the Tubular Bells LP within a week of it's release or you just weren't cool! Every teenager had the Tubular Bells LP cover in his bedroom.
Of course, after watching this YT video, it has now prompted me to listen to the whole Tubular Bells LP again - and it's still great!
P.S. If you can recommend any good autobiographies - please let me know.
Update Add_Ventoy.cmd, MAKE_E2B_USB_DRIVE.cmd, UPDATE_E2B_DRIVE.cmd (if more than one E2B drive is connected, the agFM files could be added to the wrong drive partition 2). Change download URLs.
Update UtilMan password .cmd files to also change magnify.exe and use new account name of ADMIN9.
Update Add_Ventoy.cmd to warn if core.img is not present.
Arfan noticed that the F3 Boot Menu was not working properly in agFM v1.64. Please use the latest v1.65 to fix it. You can update by running the update agFM .cmd file in the \e2b folder on partition 2 as usual.
In a recent E2B chat session, a user wanted to use an E2B USB drive to contain lots of special disk images. These images contained multiple partitions. Some of these images used multiple GPT partitions. For instance multiple Mac OS X installers, full multiple-partition Windows To Go with BitLocker, full Linux OS with swap and encrypted data partitions.etc.
Unfortunately, such a scenario is not feasible when using Easy2Boot (at least not easily!) - however, the user did own an IODD DVD emulator, so I suggested using it's VHD feature.
He did not realise that it could be used in this way!
The IODD Mini
The IODD Mini #ad SSD CD\DVD drive emulator is a solid-state version of the IODD 2531 and 2541 (see previous blog article here).
You can see from the picture below that it is approx 9cm x 4cm in size and will easily fit in a pocket.
As you may know, these Zalman and IODD 'DVD' emulators can load ISO files and then the USB device will appear as a USB DVD drive.
They can also load a VHD file and then it will appear to a computer as a 'USB disk' - so you can boot to a VHD containing a fully install Windows OS.
However, he did not realise that you could simply create an 'empty' VHD and then select that on his IODD device - thus the USB drive will appear as an unformatted USB drive.
He can then partition and format it as he wishes, install an OS to the USB 'drive', etc.
Thus it is possible for his IODD to contain multiple disk images of different multiple-partition Windows OS's, Linux OS's with swap partitions, Mac OS X, Mac Installer, Hackintosh Installers, DOS Flash images, etc. and they can be MBR or GPT partitions.
He can even mount more than one VHD as a disk device, so the second VHD could contain common programs, drivers, data, etc. which he can easily access after booting from the first VHD. You can even boot from one VHD and install to another VHD.
The IODD Mini VHD file can be configured to appear as a Removable 'Flash' drive or a 'Fixed Disk' HDD - just use either a .RMD extension or a .VHD file extension. If required, you can also write-protect the virtual disk too.
