BartPE and USB, no RamDisk

[elazar]

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

Edited August 16, 2007 by elazar

[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

[mchipser]

This works for me but it does not load the "start" menu and it does not launch my autorun.cmds

edit: LOL sorry it worked... I forgot to move my programs folder over

Edited March 15, 2008 by mchipser