But getting Hiren from it’s default distribution format of ISO onto USB isn’t completely straightforward and you can’t just grab any ISO to USB tool and expect it to be successful. As most of us know, one of the best all round recovery and repair CD’s is Hiren’s BootCD and has long been one of the most valuable discs you could have in your repair toolkit.
There are several tools available for all kinds of disc images to be written to USB, but each image could use a different loader to boot from which means there isn’t one single foolproof way of putting any image onto USB stick.įor example, a useful tool to put Windows 7 onto USB called WiNToBootic might be good for Windows 7, but is of no use for other ISO images. Depending on the speed of your pen stick USB could be much faster than using even the fastest ROM drives.
This is a real plus if you don’t have an optical drive in your machine. Just copy the files on and make a few tweaks.Thanks to USB sticks it’s now possible to put ISO images onto them and then boot the computer straight from the stick instead of burning them out to CD or DVD. (As opposed to just booting into the target hard drive) That is, if you go for the RAM'ed iso + Firadisk method.
A howto I read said to also install Plop for creating a USB XP installer, but I don't see how this is needed.Īnother Note: you must boot into the second phase of the XP installer with the Grub4DOS menu option to again load the iso into memory, which is still needed in the second phase. Note: must install Firadisk from the non-free tab for it to be able to make a USB XP installer. (What if system doesn't have enough RAM?)Īnd Multisystem insists on installing Grub2 every time you use it with a thumb drive (even if it's already installed) and even wanted to resize my thumb drive's partition. Plus it has to load the whole iso into memory which takes both RAM and time.
You'd think that if that's the only thing I want it bootable into, XP installation would be in the first menu (yes, I know, it's not possible with the Grub4DOS method, but how about a note in the menu?). You have to know to hit "Grub4DOS" under the first menu, the Grub2 menu, to get to the option to install XP.
The resultant USB drive of me only telling Multisystem to make it bootable from an XP installation iso included Grub2, Syslinux, Grub4DOS, a bootable Grub2 iso, Plop stuff, and a bunch of menu entries. I had to install xterm and run an installation script that downloaded a bunch of stuff. Personally, I find Multisystem's specific solution to creating a USB XP installer undesirable. It does work, however, it uses the method of loading the whole iso into memory in conjunction with Firadisk, as the above link discusses. If you really want to do that method, see this: Įdit: Just tried Multisystem (a Linux app) for making a USB drive bootable into the XP installer. The method of loading the whole iso into memory and booting it usually results in a blue screen at some point. Just note that you will need to make a second hardware profile, because Windows configures itself to a specific hardware configuration during the first part of the installation, and the hardware platform conjured by the hypervisor is not the same as your real hardware platform. Yes, a "real fake" as opposed to a "fake fake".). You could also try to use QEMU or VirtualBox where you actually make one of the VM's hard drives be your real target hard dirve, and simply have the hypervisor boot the iso like a CD (actual hardware emulation, not BIOS disk emulation that Grub4DOS does. However, it is a Windows-only utility (that is unsupported by Wine), so follow the tutorial here (the big post): WinUSB does not do this, UNetBootin does not do this, the diskpart tutorial does not do this, WinToFlash does not do this, and bit-banging the iso onto the device with dd does not do this. Modified copy of txtsetup.sif copied to the root level Special stuff in the bootsector of the partition (use ms-sys). Unless you have a modified SETUPLDR.BIN, it won't work from USB directly.