I've been using FalconFour 4.5 (it is a rebuild of Hiren's BootCD 13.0) a lot over the last couple of months to diagnose and fix computers, and it is extremely useful, but there is quite a lot of things included in it that I don't use and quite a few things I would like in there, so I would like to make my own.
I've Googled this extensively, but I have returned fruitless, once again. I simply want a DOS-type menu of utilities (Spinrite, Memtest, MiniXP, Ubuntu, etc) that you use the arrow keys to move up and down the list to select which tool to use. But finding something that allows to do this seems to be impossible, even though it's an extremely simple concept.
Any ideas? I'm using a Windows OS, just so everyone knows. :)
Update
I used Grud4DOS to make the USB portable and then all I had to do then was to drag the extracted files from the FalconFour .iso to the USB's root and it just worked. But the drawback is that you can only use one program per USB, as the programs files must be in the root. Surely there's a way to contain each utility in a folder and just have an .inf / .lst reference each folder, if you get me?
Once the the glrdr file loads into memory and runs, grub4dos will look for a menu file to parse and run (grldr includes a pre-boot configfile which then looks for a menu.lst file). The menu is in the form of a text file named menu.lst which is normally placed in the root of the drive. The search path that grub4dos uses to find a menu.lst file is.
I don't know FalconFour but I've done something like this recently with Hirens and Archlinux (on tha same usb-disk). You can read my story here:https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=136793
Also there is this guy here: http://simplehacksnreviews.wordpress.com/usb-multiboot-creation-tutorial/who takes this to the next step and adds several things inside his usb disk. It is very analytic and you'll probably find valuable information there.
Here is a list of some multi boot creators:
Disclaimer:I have not used any of these personally, yet...
I currently dual boot Windows 7 and Fedora 14, using GRUB, with Windows 7 as my default. I know that from Fedora, I can set GRUB to boot into Fedora, overriding the default, on the next reboot. Is there a way to do this from Windows? That is, can I change the GRUB configuration permanently or semi-permanently from Windows so I don't have to be in front of my computer to boot into Fedora?
The hard part is editing your Linux filesystem from Windows. FS Driver supports writing ext2, but I don't know of any good tools for ext3 or 4 (and these SU and SF questions aren't encouraging), let alone any other filesystems you may have used on your boot partition
But if you do manage to get write support for your boot partition from Windows, actually changing the saved default is easy. First you need to do some prep work in /boot/grub.conf
. Change default
to saved
, and add savedefault 0
(where 0 is Fedora's index in the GRUB configuration) to the Windows block so booting into Windows will reset the saved default back to Fedora
Then from Windows you can edit /boot/grub/default
. Delete the line that's there (it'll be default
or 0
most likely), and change it to 1
or whatever the index of your Windows install is. When you restart, GRUB will read that file (since your default is saved
) and boot into Windows, and the savedefault
line will change that file back to 0
for future boots
If you have a /boot
partition formatted as FAT32, you'll be able to edit grub's config file from both OS(es).
You can use Grub2Win or other similar programs as listed here.They offer an easy user interface.
You could also completly remove Grub and boot both systems from the Windows bootloader. In order to do so you need to use tools such as EasyBCD.
Find the 'grub' folder in the hard disk and then open menu.lst with notepad now edit default=0 to default=x, where x is one less than the position of the os you want to make default. For Ex. there are three os in a system and you wanted to make the third in the list as default so you will edit it as default=2, as 3-1=2. For second os, default=1.