Sunday 31 July 2016

Easy2Boot v1.82g Beta available

This v1.82g Beta includes SDI_CHOCO and the new grub4dos (beta) version which fixes the "E2B.cfg missing" error which a handful of users have experienced on certain systems containing certain partitions.

I have also renamed the E2B Win8 and Win10 XML files. When you perform an E2B Update, it will delete the old v1.81 XML files and add the new ones. If you have previously installed an SDI_CHOCO beta, I suggest you first delete all the old .XML files (that are E2B ones) and then do an Update.

As usual the download is available in the Alternate Download Areas.

Any feedback welcome.

Saturday 30 July 2016

Has the free Windows 10 upgrade really finished?

According to a Martin Brinkman blog post here, you can still get the free Win10 upgrade.
If this is true, can you also do a clean install of Win10 and use a Win7 or Win8 Product Key? Presumably the same activation process will still work as before and the trick of simply booting from a USB drive to Win10 will still work.

P.S. 2016-08-05 I booted to Win10 TH2 Pro on a Windows 7 Ultimate system today and used the Windows 7 Ult key to activate it - it worked fine!

grub4dos - good news, very good news and not so good news!

YaYa has fixed two bugs in grub4dos 0.4.6a
  1. Issue #122 - Replacing strings in a file using cat --locate=xxx --replace=yyy sometimes didn't work
  2. Issue #119 - grub4dos crashes when it access certain partitions (this is the “\_ISO\e2b\grub\E2B.cfg is MISSING!” issue)
Bug #122 has a workaround and this has been added into E2B v1.82 so that we can use older versions of grub4dos if we need to (useful for testing different versions, etc.). The bug was only found due to the new SDI_CHOCO feature in v1.82 and so did not affect previous versions of E2B.

Bug #119 is great news. Many people have helped in investigating this bug but a special thanks to Norbert who spent a lot of time to prepare a Virtual Machine in VBox which allowed the developer (YaYa) to see the problem and enabled him to fix it!

The not so good news, is that I discovered a new bug to do with certain types (joliet?) of XP ISOs crashing when accessed (e.g. using a cat command on a file inside the ISO). The bug report is Issue #123 and affects grub4dos 0.4.6a versions after 2016-04-10 (so does affect E2B v1.81 which used 2016-07-04 and E2B v1.80 which used 2016-04-26, but not E2B v1.79 which used 2016-03-26). A genuine MS XP3 ISO does not seem to be affected though and it only seems to happen with some ISOs on some systems (TBD). Hopefully, YaYa can find the problem and fix it. Then we will have a new version of grub4dos with all the major outstanding bugs fixed.

2016-08-04 - YaYa has fixed the bug. Next version should have all fixes!

Friday 29 July 2016

Wednesday 27 July 2016

SDI_CHOCO page now added to E2B website

The SDI_CHOCO feature allows you to fully automate a Windows install + install drivers + applications + Windows updates completely unattended.

Once you have it set up, when a new version of Windows is released, just copy the new Windows Install ISO onto your E2B USB drive and use that instead of the old ISO! No need to change anything else.

See here for details.

You can have multiple configurations for different systems or configurations. You can install your own custom drivers or applications too.

For instance, a full Windows 10 installation with drivers and a few applications can take about 12 minutes from first boot to the E2B USB drive to the final user Desktop (watch the video).

Hope it is not too confusing!

P.S. If you found this useful, please tick one of the Reactions boxes below.

Tuesday 26 July 2016

How to activate Windows 8/10 automatically



You can use the following cmd script to get the OEM key which has been programmed into the BIOS by the manufacturer and then activate Windows with it automatically. Of course, the OS must match the OEM key (e.g. Windows Home OS <> Windows Home Product Key).

AutoActivate.cmd  (run as admin)

@echo off
pushd "%~dp0"
set PKEY=
get_win8key.exe > WINKEY.txt
set /p PKEY=<WINKEY.txt
if not "%PKEY%"=="" (
echo Activating using key %PKEY%
cscript //NoLogo %systemroot%\system32\slmgr.vbs /ipk %PKEY% > act.log
cscript //NoLogo %systemroot%\system32\slmgr.vbs /ato >> act.log
type act.log
)
popd

get_win8key.exe can be obtained from here. It also works on Windows 10 systems.

P.S. after downloading get_win8key.exe - right-click on the file - Properties - and tick UnBlock. Otherwise Windows Powershell may refuse to run it.

How to automate the installation of Windows and Lenovo drivers using SDI_CHOCO

Here is how I modified SDI_CHOCO on my E2B drive so that instead of using Snappy to install generic drivers, it installs all the correct official Lenovo drivers and applications.

New user files are created by the end user to modify the install behaviour, so updating E2B to the latest version will not delete these new files because only the original E2B files are updated.

If you have several different models of PCs and Notebooks to install, then the XML file and SDI_CHOCO folder structure should be duplicated, renamed and modified accordingly, for each different model.


Monday 25 July 2016

Easy2Boot v1.82SDIf Beta now available

Version 1.82f does not install any choco applications by default now (i.e. Google Chrome and TeamViewer are not installed by default).

I think that v1.82 is getting good enough for release now, so please test and provide feedback.
I am still waiting for a grub4dos bugfix though.

Sunday 24 July 2016

E2B v1.82SDIe Beta with WSUS Offline Update support

This new version includes support for the WSUS Offline Update utility.

You can download and extract WSUS Offline Update to the \_ISO\WINDOWS\INSTALLS\wsusoffline folder of your USB drive and then run updategenerator.exe - pick the OS's you want to support - e.g. Win 8.1 x86 & x64, Win 10 x86 and x64 - and then download the updates (this may take quite a while!).

Easy2Boot v1.82SDId Beta available

The v1.82d Beta version has a few new XML files added for Windows 8 and 10 ISO installs:

  • Win10_Choose_a_key_SDI_CHOCO.xml
  • Win8_Choose_a_key_SDI_CHOCO.xml
These allow you to do a manual install of any Win8/10 ISO and choose the Product Key that you want to use (i.e. the same as the default Option 0 choice, but it also runs the SDI_CHOCO install, so it will install drivers and applications). These two new XML files do not contain any other configuration settings and are not 'automated'.

There is also a new E2B feature for Windows 8 and Windows 10 (and 2016) installs from an ISO.