{"id":7,"date":"2009-04-21T21:25:58","date_gmt":"2009-04-22T02:25:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.falatic.com\/?p=7"},"modified":"2009-09-06T03:05:49","modified_gmt":"2009-09-06T08:05:49","slug":"fun-with-bootable-flash-drives","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.falatic.com\/index.php\/7\/fun-with-bootable-flash-drives","title":{"rendered":"Fun with bootable flash drives!"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’ve been fiddling with making bootable flash drives lately, via UBCD4Win<\/a> for the most part.\u00a0 It’s actually come in handy a few times in the last month alone and the new v3.50 just came out today!\u00a0 In the course of this I’ve learned a couple of useful things that might be worthwhile to others working on this.<\/p>\n

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Flash Drives and The Removable Bit<\/h3>\n

Something I stumbled upon today was a Lexar utility that can flip the removable bit on a flash drive.\u00a0 Disclaimer: this may not work for you or could even cause problems!<\/strong><\/span><\/span> As you may have noticed a flash drive appears as a “removable disk” in explorer, and (as I understand it) cannot be partitioned in XP or lower (Vista doesn’t seem to care as much from what I can tell).Indeed, it works, making the drive go from “removable” to “basic” (that is, fixed or local).<\/p>\n

As I was doing all this in Vista with UAC enabled I was alarmed when it appeared that once I flipped the bit there was no flipping it back!\u00a0 It’s not necessarily bad but I prefer to keep it removable unless otherwise necessary.\u00a0 After lots of flailing (and finding a few posts alluding to this one-way trip problem – but no answers) I ran the utility via the “Run as administrator” option<\/span>. This allowed BootIt to see the “fixed” disks (which the flash drive becomes a part of after flipping the bit).\u00a0 Be VERY careful not to mess with the wrong drive of course! <\/strong> I think Vista is more protective of the fixed disks, thus the unexpected hurdle.<\/p>\n

Note: I was able to flip the removable bit on Lexar and A-DATA drives, but I had no luck with<\/strong> my 4GB OCZ Rally2, a Sandisk Cruzer Micro or with an old Pocket Disk brand 128MB drive (handy for small images) which all stayed resolutely removable.<\/p>\n

Read more about the Lexar BootIt (Flip the Removable Media Bit)<\/strong><\/em> tool here<\/a> and here<\/a> (I used v1.07, which I think is the only one out there).<\/p>\n

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Adding bootable ISO images to UBCD4Win images<\/h3>\n

It’s pretty easy to add bootable ISO images to UBCD4Win (this is tested with v3.22 and should work with v3.50 equally well).\u00a0 Today I had LOTS of “fun” dealing with a lost boot manager on my triple-boot laptop (Vista, Ubuntu, Win7, oh my!<\/em>) and I snagged copies of GParted<\/a> and Super Grub<\/a> to try and save the day.\u00a0 All I did was download them and add the ISOs to the \/images tree on the prepared flash drive.\u00a0 Then I added a couple of entries in \/menu.lst as follows:<\/p>\n

title Super Grub\r\nmap --mem (hd0,0)\/\/Images\/super_grub.iso (hd32)\r\nmap --hook\r\nchainloader (hd32)\r\nrootnoverify (hd32)<\/pre>\n
title GParted\r\nmap --mem (hd0,0)\/\/Images\/gparted-live.iso (hd32)\r\nmap --hook\r\nchainloader (hd32)\r\nrootnoverify (hd32)<\/pre>\n
The ISO names must match what’s in \/images, and I’d avoid putting spaces in the names too.\u00a0 The usual disclaimer applies: I figured this out by trial and error but it worked fine for me.<\/strong><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n
Super Grub ended up working and saving the day!\u00a0 GParted, not so much… I had to put it on a CD to get it to fully work.\u00a0 This is no fault of GParted… as far as I can tell the same problem would affect ANY partition tool. GParted actually got stuck in a repeating loop of attempting to mount a drive and I think it had to do with how the boot process involved resetting the USB hub (thus resetting the flash drive).\u00a0 Other partition managers that pass through a USB stage also experienced the same issues.\u00a0 Booting GParted from the CD-RW appears to avoid all that.\u00a0 I had the same problem when I attemtped to mount and install the Ubuntu 9.04 ISO from that USB drive today… it worked fine from a DVD.\u00a0 So, while this method works in theory it may not always be practical given the limitations of booting from USB.<\/p>\n
What’s nice is that once I have a small stable of utilities like this I can eventually burn the whole thing onto a DVD for near-universal usage (even on machines that won’t boot from flash).\u00a0 Pretty handy!\u00a0 \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n
Update: <\/strong><\/em>there are better ways to do this menu thing I’m sure… and apparently the CD ISO uses an entirely different menu system for some reason.\u00a0 So at a minimum \/BCDW\/BCDW.INI also needs to be updated (but I’m not yet sure what that should look like).<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I’ve been fiddling with making bootable flash drives lately, via UBCD4Win for the most part.\u00a0 It’s actually come in handy a few times in the last month alone and the […]<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"Layout":"","footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[13,17,14,18,16,12,19,15],"class_list":["entry","author-marty","has-more-link","post-7","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","category-uncategorized","tag-flash-drives","tag-gparted","tag-removable-bit","tag-super-grub","tag-uac","tag-ubcd4win","tag-ubuntu","tag-vista"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.falatic.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.falatic.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.falatic.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.falatic.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.falatic.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.falatic.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.falatic.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.falatic.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.falatic.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}