elazar

Well, I bit the bullet. I went out and and picked up a Lexar Jumdrive Lightning2 2GB, used the USB format tool to flip the removable bit, I setup 2 partitions on it, one 500MB(Active,Boot) and the other the rest of the drive(1.38GB). I then made the drive bootable using syslinux, built UBCD4WIN using Windows 2003 Server R2 SP2, renamed i386 to minint and setupldr to ntldr, copied it to the 2nd partition and lo and behold! it booted just fine on my Thinkpad T42. So it is the removable bit after all, I called Sandisk, and for the record, I was told that they do not have a tool that will flip the bit in the firmware, which sucks because I really like my Cruzer. Anyhow, I started experimenting with turning the Hitachi driver into a plugin, I don't think it is going to work though because filter drivers such as that cannot be loaded by txtsetup. Anyone up for writing a disk.sys clone that ignores the RMB? Elazar

Thanks jaclaz Im gonna work on this over the weekend. I did experiment with loading grub4dos from syslinux which worked nicely, but I still got 0x0000007b from BartPE, right before it BSODs I noticed that it does attempt to read from the machines harddisk, maybe it is a driver issue. Anyhow, I found that hiding the other partitions does not help and I get NTDETECT failed with map: hd0 = usb hd1 = harddisk map (hd0) (hd1) map (hd1) (hd0) map --hook rootnoverify (hd0,2) '3rd partition, bartpe chainloader (hd0,2)/setupldr.bin boot Anyhow, I appreciate the help, I am going to try this same setup on a different drive and see what happens. Elazar

Hi, I have been experimenting with multi-booting my SanDisk Cruzer Titanium 4GB using multiple partitions. Here is what I have done so far: 1. Created 3 primary partitions on the drive by using the Hitachi Microdrive driver from xpefiles.com so that I XP sees it as a fixed disk(if anybody knows of a utility for this drive to permanently flip the removable media bit, please share ) Partition 1: Various Linux distros Partition 2: UBCD4Win (Windows 2003 Server Ent R2 SP2) Partition 3: BartPE (Windows 2003 Server Ent) 2. Made all 3 partitions bootable using syslinux(syslinux'd each one) 3. I am using ldntldr.bin from GrubUtils loadbin(http://download.gna.org/grubutil/) to load setupldr.bin on the PE partitions. Like this: Main syslinux.cfg kernel chain.c32 append hd0 2 2nd Partition syslinux.cfg: UBCD4Win linux ldntldr.bin append initrd=setupldr.bin When I boot either of the PE partitions, I get a BSOD 0x0000007b in the middle of the boot logo. The interesting thing is, both of them booted fine when the drive was partitioned as a single partition. I am assuming that it is either an issue with the removable bit or maybe something to do with the USB driver load order(this really would not make sense though, because it would have never booted when everything was on a single partition if this was the issue). If anyone could shed some light on this, I would really appreciate it. TIA, Elazar

One more thing, you can boot kernels straight from the boot prompt in siblo. DO NOT do this for bartpe. It will hang. I am assuming that siblo is unable to detect if setupldr is an NT kernel. Make sure to boot it from the config(ntloader setupldr.bin)... E

First off I must say MSFN rocks! I have been browsing around for the past 2 days while trying to build myself the "ultimate" bootable UFD. This is my first post and I would like to share my experience with getting BartPE to boot from USB. I know this topic has been posted to death so before I lead more people down the beaten path of frustration, let me just say, I am almost positive that this only works on systems that boot UFDs as hard disks(USB-HD) and not floppy disks(USB-FD). I have a Sandisk Cruzer Titanium 2GB and here is what I did: 1. Format your UFD for FAT32 2. Download SIBLO from http://simplux.org/siblo/. SIBLO is a syslinux variant which can boot load the nt kernel directly. Install SIBLO on your UFD using '%siblopath%\install_siblo siblo.bin r:' where r is the drive letter of your UFD. 3. Build your PE image using Bart's PEBuilder, make sure you use XP SP2 or 2003 pre SP1, as we are going to have to hex edit the setupldr.bin and 2003 SP1 and up have a checksum(there are instructions in this forum somewhere for editing the checksum). 4. Copy the PE directory structure to your UFD into a folder with a name EXACTLY 6 characters long(i.e. bartpe etc). We need to flatten the directory structure, so we are going to copy the contents of I386 to our folder(bartpe). It should look like this: bartpe -system32 -fonts -inf -winsxs -programs -SETUPLDR.BIN -NTDETECT.COM -TXTSETUP.SIF -EXPLORER.EXE -BIOSINFO.INF -SPCMDCON.SYS -NTDETECT.COM 5. Copy NTDETECT.COM to the root of your UFD 6. Here comes the fun part. We need to edit setupldr.bin. Using Hex WorkShop or the hex editor of your choice, you are going to find all instances of 'minint', there should be 3. Now, pay attention, you are ONLY going to replace the FIRST and THIRD instances(so the instance that says /MININT you are NOT going to replace) with the name of your folder(i.e. BARTPE). Make sure that the name that you replace it with is in UPPERCASE. 7. Build your siblo config file(siblo.cfg). The siblo config file is the same as the syslinux config file. Here is mine for example: PROMPT 1 TIMEOUT 600 DEFAULT backtrack2 DISPLAY BootMenu.txt label backtrack2 kernel /bt/vmlinuz append vga=0x317 max_loop=255 initrd=/bt/initrd.gz init=linuxrc load_ramdisk=1 prompt_ramdisk=0 ramdisk_size=4444 root=/dev/ram0 rw label backtrack2safe kernel /bt/vmlinuz append vga=769 max_loop=255 initrd=/bt/initrd.gz init=linuxrc load_ramdisk=1 prompt_ramdisk=0 ramdisk_size=4444 root=/dev/ram0 rw label memtest86 kernel /mt86/mt86 label bartpe ntloader /bartpe/setupldr.bin *BackTrack2 is a Linux security distro, kinda like KnoppixSTD My BootMenu.txt looks like this 'backtrack2' for BackTrack2 'backtrack2safe' for BackTrack2 'bartpe' for BartPE 8. Test it My UFD drive structure looks like this: bt bartpe ntdetect.com siblo.cfg bootmenu.txt Hope this helps someone... E