Tuesday 19 November 2013

System won't boot Easy2Boot from a USB Hard disk?

TGP1994 on reboot.pro wrote that he had a Dell Optiplex 7010. He had made an Easy2Boot (E2B) USB Hard drive and also an E2B USB 'Helper' Flash drive. The problem was that when both USB drives were connected, the Dell insisted on booting from the USB Flash drive and would not boot from the E2B USB Hard disk.

If you are using the E2B Helper+USB HDD combination, it would be useful if you could boot from either of them and still run E2B. To do this, just install grub4dos onto the USB Helper Flash drive and also copy the grldr file onto it (using RMPrepUSB). Then add a new menu.lst file (press F4 in RMPrepUSB) and add these lines:

echo Booting from the Easy2Boot Helper USB Flash drive...
find --set-root /_ISO/e2b/grub/menu.lst
chainloader /grldr
boot

This will allow you to boot from either one of the USB drives and run E2B. However, you will only be able to run Windows Install ISOs. If you use any function which uses the grub4dos partnew command (e.g. booting from a linux .iso file) this will not work because partnew makes a new partition on hd0 (the boot drive) and the ISO file must also be on the same drive. As hd0 will be the helper flash drive and the ISOs are on the USB HDD, partnew will not work. v1.23 and later may fix this issue.

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