Booting From USB

[rolanddes]

Hello Everyone..

I have a few things in my mind if which i wanna know can be done.

1- I have an 8 gb sandisk usb pen drive formatted in FAT32.
2- I have my windows xp in iso format
3- I have Hiren's boot cd.
4- I have portable virtualbox and a windows xp image for that.


With these I basicly want to be able to boot my computer from that drive. But I want to be able use all of them at the same time. I mean that I want to get a menu like that:

1- Run windowsxp.iso
2- Run Hiren's boot cd.iso
3- Run windows xp with virtualbox


Is there anyway to do that?


Ps: Hiren has smthg here about booting his cd from a pen drive which did not work for me. I had a file missing error (http://www.hiren.info/pages/bootcd-on-usb-disk)

 

[hellokitty[hk]]

Interesting, I am a little busy, but i will do that too soon enough. Too bad i don't really know anything about it either so for now, ill just bump your post up to the top again.
Thanks for waiting instead of double posting.

 

[rolanddes]

Thanks a lot. I'll be waiting..

 

[hellokitty[hk]]

No one D:.
I found this while working on my own USB booting:

I have tried many ways to do this, using the latest version of BCDW which
supports unedited ISO files (for example Acronis boot CD) and the memdisk
way shown here. I can always get the initial menu's to load in Hirens, but
every time I try to choose any of the tools on Hirens BootCD, I get the message:



!! BootCD files were not found. !!

I have done exactly what MICHELLIN said:

1 - Opened Hiren's boot CD iso with ISObuster.
2 - Right clicked "Bootable Disk" in the left pane.
3 - Chose "Extract Bootable Disk" and saved the files
4 - Now I have the boot image "Microsoft Corporation.img"
5 - Opened "Microsoft Corporation.img" with WinImage.
6 - Saved it out as "hirens.ima" and put that file on the root of my CD.
7 - Copied the folder from BootCD folder from Hiren's CD to the root of my CD.
8 - Edited the cdshell.ini file to say:

if $lastKey == key[6]; then memdisk /hirens.ima

But whenever I try to use any of the tools I get the message above:
!! BootCD files were not found. !!

Did you guys get the tools to load or did you just assume it works
because it does load the initial Hiren's menu, the error only happens
when you try to use any of the tools - I suspect this is something to
do with it using the B:\ drive? Or is it the R:\ drive? I don't understand
why it won't work since the BootCD folder from Hirens is where it would
be if it was the original Hiren's CD.

HAYELP!!!!

EDIT:

Well theres something real funny going on because even the original ISO won't boot

I am kinda glad in a way, at least I know its not anything I am doing wrong... the ISO
does not load ANYWAY! FFS... this is v8.8 of Hirens, maybe I should try v8.7 or something,
grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr....

... by the way I am doing all this in VMware - I guess its a VMware issue, pah, wheres
my trusty rewritable CD..........

http://www.msfn.org/board/lofiversion/index.php/t77005.html

With these I basicly want to be able to boot my computer from that drive. But I want to be able use all of them at the same time. I mean that I want to get a menu like that:

1- Run windowsxp.iso
2- Run Hiren's boot cd.iso
3- Run windows xp with virtualbox

If I am not mistaken, Hiren's uses a GRUB bootloader, now I don't really know what I am talking about, but you should be able to configure grub to do all that.

I would also recommend Ultimate boot CD which you probably already know about, and XP.SP3.Lite by Tiros, a lightend version of XPSP3 and only 170mb:
part 1 (http://rapidshare.com/files/146742755/windows.xp.sp3.lite.final.2008.v3.by.tiros.part1.rar)

part2 (http://rapidshare.com/files/146746576/windows.xp.sp3.lite.final.2008.v3.by.tiros.part2.rar)

part3 (http://rapidshare.com/files/146748078/windows.xp.sp3.lite.final.2008.v3.by.tiros.part3.rar)

You could take a look at http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/windows-pocket,1113.html and BartsPE.

 

[rolanddes]

Thanks a lot. These sources will definetely help me a lot..

 

[hellokitty[hk]]

Alright followed hiren's instructions for the 9.8 release (I think people may consider Hiren's warez, so on this forum I will call it my ultimate boot cd modified, i'm pretty sure UBC is fine).
Did it on some cheep 256mb DanElect flash drive, got a file not found error too on the miniXP and hirens.

Redid it on my OCZ Rally2 16gb, works great , creator of 'UBCM' is pretty skilled ^^.
I have heard booting from an USB is hit or miss, I didn't quite believe that until now...

EDIT: From what I know, and I really don't know much, you should be able to add XP ('UBCM's MiniXP is...ok, pretty good, but its still only about 30mb, so its not exactly XP) by just adding:

title Mini Windows Xp
find --set-root /HBCD/XPLOADER.BIN
chainloader /HBCD/XPLOADER.BIN

that should create another menu item in UBCM's GRUB menu and properly execute whatever file I think, though how you add XP onto a flash drive and make it runable like in UBCM is beyond me...