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Bootable Grub4dos USB, plus use it for regular USB storage?

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I use Xboot to create a bootable USB flash drive with various ISOs, including ATIH recovery media ISOs. I use Xboot, but the end result is very similar to what would be created by using Grub4dos directly.

Is it possible to use other free space on the USB flash drive to store regular files? I've tried it, and the flash drive ends up not bootable at some point, leading me to suspect that this may not be possible or at least not reliable.

Anyone do this, use the USB flash drive as bootable Grub4dos or Xboot, but also be able to put other files and portable .exe Windows apps on it?

Or, must the flash drive be partitioned for this to work?

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I use Grub4DOS on a lot of my drives and still use them normally. Grub4DOS doesn't get in the way of that. All drives are partitioned normally. I haven't used Xboot.

Do you have any ideas of what you did just before the drive becomes unbootable?

One of my internal drives is a 640GB capacity SATA disk which does not have a Windows system installed. For more than a year now, I have Grub4Dos installed on this disk and boot into Grub4Dos probably at least every couple weeks. The disk is accessed multiple times every hour. I have virtually no issues with this data only disk. Whenever I want to boot into an Acronis bootable media, this is my first choice as I have several iso versions of TI stored and accessible on this internal disk. I regularly do screen captures of various TrueImage versions and do so via the Grub4Dos interface.

I also have a 16GB Flash drive which is Grub4Dos bootable. I use it in much the same manner as the internal disk and I have data stored on the flash drive which I move back and forth from the both drives. None of my usage would indicte any issues using Grub4Dos and the storage or movement of regular files.

I use XBOOT for ATIH and a lot of other bootable ISOs and it works great. Yes I use the couple of XBOOT devices for other storage (in one case I backup files to it every day) and have never had them become "not bootable" so I dunno what to say tuttle.

Are you using the latest version of XBOOT?

tuttle,

When the drive becomes not bootable what error message displays when you try to boot it?

Hi:

Sorry, I was unable to access the forums for a bit.

When the drive becomes not bootable, I get messge in white text on black screeen:

Error loading operating system

Once that occurs, after booting into Windows the flash drive is then not accessible from Windows, and Windows reports that it is not formatted. I'm doing more testing, but at this point I'm not sure what causes this.

I'm using xboot vs1.0beta14

This happened to me once until I found out that the BIOS was no longer set for the proper boot device, So I might surmise that when this error occurs (after using Grub4Dos), the boot device may need to be reset.

In this case, BIOS is unchanged. BIOS still allows booting from CD or USB prior to internal HDD.

The error situation occurs on my older Dell laptop. Sequence is:

Boots as expected from Xboot USB flash drive. This can be repeated many times.

After booting from Xboot USB flash drive, main Xboot screen shows an option "Boot from Hard Disk". This option is what defaults if the timeout is reached before I select an option. If that option is selected, either explicitly or through timeout, then system boots from internal HDD. However, when this happens the system does not immediately boot from the Windows OS partition (which is the Active partition), but from the small hidden Dell partition that includes diagnostics. The diagnostics run tests on memory, drive and other hardware.

If I try to boot from Xboot USB flash drive after that diagnostic boot, (when Xboot USB flash drive was still inserted), then I get that error condition of white text on black screeen:

Error loading operating system

The flash drive is then not accessible from Windows, and Windows reports that it is not formatted.
Perhaps the diagnostics change some of the Xboot boot files, rendering it unbootable.

I'm having this *exact* same problem.

But, I did find a little workaround. I used XBoot14 and used the SysLinux option. I changed the default action at the end of the timeout.

In the USB directory "\boot\syslinux\", there is a file called syslinux.cfg.
Immediately above the "TIMEOUT 150" command I added "DEFAULT Linux".
Immediately above the "MENU LABEL Linux", I changed "LABEL - " to "LABEL Linux".
The result is that when the timeout happens, the menu jumps into the "Linux" menu and stops the countdown.

I changed the "TIMEOUT 150" from the default of "TIMEOUT 100" as well, but I don't think that had anything to do with whether it worked or not.

I'd be very interested in finding out how to change which partition it decides to load from.... I don't have time to dig into the details of syslinux config files....

Below is the first part of my "menu.lst" file. This looks to be where I should change something if I want it to load into the non-diagnostic partition of Windoze.
--------------------------------------------

color magenta/white white/magenta black/white black/white
timeout 10

### MENU START
title Boot from hard drive
map (hd0) (hd1)
map (hd1) (hd0)
map --hook
chainloader (hd0,0)
### MENU END