Tuesday 2 June 2015

Easy2Boot 1.69Beta2 (experimental) now supports Win7/8/10 .VHD and .WIM files

Previously, you could add .VHD files to your Easy2Boot USB drive, but these would only work for XP/PE1 if the VHD had a WinVBlock or FiraDisk driver added.

The v1.69Beta2 version now supports Win7/8/10 .VHD files and Win7/8/10 .WIM files. It uses Chenall's NTBOOT. No need to make .imgPTN files for simple MBR booting of WindowsToGo/WinPE.



I have had to make a change to the supported file extensions in E2B, so that if you currently have an XP .VHD file, you need to change it to .VHDboot.

The new (experimental) supported extensions in v1.69Beta2 are now:

(tested)
.VHDboot - direct boot from /bootmgr or /ntldr from inside VHD - typically works for special XP VHDs that include WinVBlock\FiraDisk driver. Was .VHD in earlier versions.
.VHD - direct boot using /bootmgr (Win7/8/10). e.g. Win10 Tech Preview.VHD
.WIM - direct boot from .WIM file of Win7/8/10 or PE/NT6 wim file - only wim files containing single images are supported.

(experimental/untested - may be removed in later versions)
.VHDX - Same as .VHD but using a .VHDX file
.WIMPE1 - NT5/XP boot from a Windows PE XP .wim file
.imgNT5, .imgXP - boot using /ntldr from a hard disk image file
.VHDNT5, .VHDXNT5 - boot using VBOOT

These files do not need to be contiguous (even if E2B warns you that they are not contiguous!).
Just copy the files to \_ISO\MAINMENU (or any 'normal' menu folder) and boot!

Tip: If you have an E2B USB Hard disk with two partitions, you can put these large files on the 2nd NTFS partition of your E2B drive, e.g. put them in the 2nd partition's \_ISO folder and copy the PTN2_Menu.mnu file from \_ISO\docs\Sample mnu files\E2B Menus to \_ISO\MAINMENU. You can then place all your VHDs and WIM files in the \_ISO folder on the 2nd partition and don't have to run WinContig on them. You can edit the PTN2_Menu.mnu to change the source folder to be whatever you prefer, rather than \_ISO.

PTN2_Menu.mnu allows the user to choose files on the 2nd partition.

Just copy the files to the correct folder (e.g. \_ISO\MAINMENU on E2B partition or \_ISO on 2nd partition)
Some files used in NTBOOT still require clarification on licensing/copyright, so I may have to remove some of these features later though!



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