tjcinnamon

Is it possible to use this for other applications such as: XP install 7 install UBCD Memtest x86 ect... It would be nice to have a number of images on a USB stick and then pick them from grub. Also, it would be easy to upgrade the versions of the ISO's because all you would have to do is replace the ISO with the most recent version (and maybe modify the bootloader, if the image name changed). Not sure if this is capable of this but if it was that would be awesome.

I need to install some drivers in a bootable environment. I put an imaged drive in one of our new computers at work and windows needs to be "Activated" however I don't have drivers for the NIC installed for this new computer on the image. Therefore I cannot activate winows online. I could do the phone option but it takes a long time and you need to have the serial for your original license which is long gone on our 5 year old gateways. However, we have a ton of open licenses (so licensing is not an issue). I've called microsoft and we fixed it before but it took forever. Plus, I think knowing how to install a driver from a bootable environment will be really useful. Any ideas? JOe K.

I recently started using this program. It's great. I imaged a few drives at work. These were 70GB drives that only had 15GB of data. When I imaged them they only ended up being 8GB. Is there a way I can tell before I image a partition with this program, how big will the image be after compression? Lets say I have 150GB of data is that depended on the kind of data? Thanks, JOe K.

Thanks for the advice. It was a foolish move to try and shrink prior to back up without a defrag. I thought when they resized a partition the program would defrag and move the files first. Lesson learned. I'll keep you updated. Thanks for the help, JOe K.

I have the 15 day demo. I've only used it for a day. So yes I think I have that. Also, would it make sense that the partition table blew out because I was able to log into the machine (with random errors popping up will things loaded) but then when I restarted to run a scan disk is when the OS was no longer able to boot. Would the partition blowing out have everything just start to unravel? Or would I have never been able to boot at all? Thanks, JOe K.

I am backing up all (3) of our finance departments computers. All of the important data is on the server (Thank GOD). I am backing them up because their set up is a more complex than most of the office machines. I used Acronis Disk Manager to shrink the partitions down to smaller 20GB sizes (the PC's have 140GB but only 12GB used). I figured I could shrink them down to 20GB and then back all three of the PC's on to one 74GB drive and do it twice. The first machine went fine. I shrunk the partition and backed it up. The second machine at some point during the partition shrinking the program errored out. I'm not sure where. The 2nd machine booted at first, I got a lot of weird errors on windows starting up about certain files being damaged. I immediatly tried to run a ScanDisk and when I restarted, to run the scandisk, it said that windows cannot start due to PCI.sys is damaged or missing. It says I should try to try to do a repair windows install. I tried to put in the XP install disk it freezes on the disk and says that it's missing a file. I am going to try another XP install disk but I'm not sure if that will fix the problem. Would a scan disk help this computer start up, after all it did but once? What is going on with it? What software would fix this? How can I salvage this computer or at least repair it enough to be able to re-setup the machine by Monday so no one can blindly blame me for something. Thanks, JOe K.

what do you mean by other approaches? Are you referring to a multiboot USB? If so, (you don't have to tell me how to do it, I can research that), is it possible to install OS's (beyond XP, which I have done with mutliboot.cmd) with a Multiboot USB. I'm particularily interested in OSX, XP and Vista. Thanks, JOe K.

When you say use the USB mass storage what do you mean by that?

Thanks for your detailed response! So when a DVD or CD is read in the BIOS is the driver for reading UDF and CDFS contained in the CD drive? If this is true then is, of which it most likely is (below): Is creating the UDF or CDFS partition even necessary for creating bootable install disks that can be seen from the BIOS? I'm trying to find a unified method to boot the install disks of OSX, XP, Vista, and other OS's from a USB drive. JOe K.

Is it possible while using Grub4Dos that I could lose access to my XP OS (if I screw it up)? I should probably learn how to do this anyway. I will look for a good tutorial on this site. The other thing I was thinking was to format my USB stick as UDF or CDFS and try to have it read that way. With UltraISO I can write (burn) the image to USB stick the problem is the File System.

I am trying to get a USB drive to be able to boot all bootable images (in the BIOS). With a ton of work I have been able to get my USB drive to work as an XP install disk.I want to do the same for other OS install disks as well as other bootable applications. The only way I can think to do this is to format a USB drive as UDF or CDFS. There is a program out there that does UDF but it is $90 and there is no demo. http://www.softarch.com/us/products/ddtu.html The sanDisk U3 cruzer comes with a 6mb CDFS partition for there annoying software so CDFS can be done as well. Does anyone know of a way to format a USB drive to UDF or CDFS? Thanks, JOe K.

Hi, I have successfully created an install USB key using the multiboot_cmd program. I found this other program called UltraISO which allows you to write an image to a USB key. It works with BartPE but it does not work with a windows install iso. I keep getting a "Status 18, txtSetup.sif, missing or corrupt." Any idea why this is happening? I used the windiff.exe program and compared the two txtSetup.sif's and they are identical. I also compared the USB key to a functional burned disk txtSetup.sif as well. All 3 txtSetup.sif (iso, USB, Burned) identical. Thanks, JOe K.

Is there a piece of software available where I could load any bootable image on a thumbdrive and have it act as a virtual drive before the OS loads? There are a few bootable images that I want to run but all of them have to be burned to a CD/DVD in order to have them load before the OS. Thanks, JOe K.

Hi, Great utility. I tried to install XP on my optical drive-less tablet and it took me days until I found your gem. I retired it for a while but now I am re-formating a few of my machines. Anyways I have 2 machines where the USB key loads the bootloader (txt, GUI, Grub ect...). On another machine (the most important one, murphey's law), I get a "disk read error occured; Press Ctrl+Alt+Del to restart" I'm confident I have the USB stick set up correctly because it works on 2 of my machines. Clearly somethings not working. Any idea's on what I have done or what may be wrong? Thanks, JOe K.