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).

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).

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.

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)

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!).

Animated Britney Spears bitmaps for E2B

This example shows how to display a sequence of 26 bitmaps on E2B start-up.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 :-)

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...

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!

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.

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.

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.

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!

E2B v1.75 now released

v1.75 is also available on the two Alternate Download sites.

Google Drive download area

OneDrive download area