Make and burn an E2B DVD or CD
These instructions are for experts who know their way around grub4dos menus!
YOU HAVE BEEN WARNED!
Easy2Boot is designed to work when booting from a writeable drive such as a USB Flash drive, SD card or USB Hard Disk. Unless the E2B boot media is writeable under grub4dos, then some (most!) E2B functions won't work correctly.
You can make an ISO from a working E2B drive which you can then burn as a bootable E2B CD or DVD - but don't get too excited though because many things won't work properly and there is a danger you could destroy disk partitions on the system you are booting it on!
- Windows installs - XP via WinPE installs and Win8/SVR2012 installs won't work (Vista/7 needs a Helper USB Flash drive and XP step1/2 may work but I have not tested them!).
- Many linux ISOs won't work unless you use a .mnu file which has special cheat codes in it or the ISOBOOT feature - this is because E2B can't use the partnew command (which it nearly always uses to boot most ISOs) on a CD! Use a .mnu file which does not use the partnew command or rename the file extension to .isoboot so that E2B 'ISOBOOT' is used to boot the linux iSO.
- Do NOT use any .mnu file which uses the grub4dos partnew command - hd0 will be your internal hard disk and you could erase partitions on your hard disk!
- UEFI booting (using .imgPTN image files) is not supported.
The CD\DVD that you make will also support FASTLOAD so it does not have to enumerate all the ISOs each time it boots.
The grub4dos commands should not use the 'partnew' command - instead you need to use 'cheat codes' to point linux at the .iso file or the squashfs file:
- Use a 'small' distro of linux that does not use a squashfs (.sfs) file such as the FatDog64 ISOs
- Use 'cheat codes' to direct linux to your ISO file (e.g. fromiso= or iso-scan/filename=, bootfrom=) in a .mnu file (use the sample .mnu files examples for peristence as a template but remove the peristence code)
- Extract the files from the ISO and direct linux to the folder where they are stored (e.g. using psubdir=) and use a .mnu file
- Use the ISOBOOT feature for supported linux ISOs (or hold down the SHIFT key before selecting the ISO file in the menu)
See here for examples
1. Make a USB Flash drive (or USB HDD) with E2B
2. Add your payload files and test as normal
3. (optional) If you want FASTLOAD enabled on your final CD/DVD then copy FASTLOAD.YES to the root of the USB drive
4. (optional) If you have FASTLOAD enabled, boot the USB drive on a real system.
Then reboot it to test that it loads the menu from cache correctly. Tip: If possible, write-protect the USB drive to emulate a read-only CD/DVD.
5. Run RMPrepUSB and select the USB drive - then select File - Make grub4dos ISO from drive. Choose 'No' if asked to make a WinPE ISO. This will make a bootable E2B ISO file.
6. (optional) Test the ISO using RMPrepUSB Ctrl+F11 (File - Boot from ISO using QEMU Emulator)
7. Burn your ISO (or copy it to a Zalman ZM VE-200/300/400 or IsoStick for testing).
I strongly suggest that you search all the .mnu files that you are using and check that they don't use the partnew command - otherwise you could accidentally delete a partition on a hard drive when you boot the CD/DVD!
Test by booting from the ISO file as a virtual DVD using Virtual Box and check that Virtual Hard disk 0 is not corrupted, before you use the CD\DVD on a real system.
Tip: In the \_ISO\MyE2B.cfg file, add set CD=1 - this will force E2B into CD write-protect mode and when booting from USB, E2B will use ISOBOOT to boot linux ISO files (ISOBOOT will also work when booting from a CD).
