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Create a Multi-Boot USB with UBCD4Win and System Rescue CD ...

Submitted by Michael Burns on Thu, 03/03/2011 - 22:26
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I am the "family" IT department. Yes, family includes far more than just those who are related to me as others in my place are fully aware.

Anyway, I always need different types of tools to provide the support I do. And, in this day and age of flash drives, it has always been a goal of mine to have a flash drive that could boot into various utilities.

Well, the remainder of this article explains how I accomplished that goal using UBCD for Windows and MultiBootISOs.

My goal was to have a flash drive that consisted of the following tools:

I accomplished this goal, and then some, using the steps below. This process was based upon information obtained from the following two articles:

So, on to the steps.

  1. Download the necessary files
  2. Build the UBCD iso (follow the instructions at: http://ubcd4win.com/howto.htm
  3. Create a bootable USB flash drive using the UBUSB utility. The default options should suffice.
  4. Verify the bootable USB flash drive using the Test USB option on the UBUSB utility. This loads QEMU and boots to the USB device. Shutdown UBCD for Windows before continuing.
  5. Rename the syslinux folder to syslinux.ubusb
  6. Renamed the menu.lst file to menu.lst.ubusb
  7. Execute the MultiBootISOs and installed the desired utilities. Just follow the on-screen instructions. I installed System Rescue CD, Parted Magic, UBCD and a couple of others.
  8. Modify menu.lst and add the section from the renamed menu.lst.ubusb for the UBCD4Win boot. It will look similar to the following:
    title “Ultimate Boot CD for Windows”
    fallback 1
    find –set-root /ntldr
    chainloader /ntldr
    savedefault –wait=2

That's it! I now have a USB flash drive in my pocket that allows me to resolve most issues that would require special tools.

Note: In Step 2, UBCD4Win will execute mkisofs.exe. When I got to that point, the following error was generated:

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C:\ubcd4win\temp\mkisofs.exe (1576): *** shared version mismatch detected - 0x2D1E009C/0x75BE0074.
You have multiple copies of cygwin1.dll on your system. Search for cygwin1.dll using the Windows Start->Find/Search facility and delete all but the most recent version. The most recent version *should* reside in x:\cygwin\bin, where 'x' is the drive on which you have installed the cygwin distribution.
-------------------------------------------------

To resolve this, I had to find the copy of cygwin1.dll that was being used by one or more other applications on my system. I then copied that file to the following two folders:

c:\UBCD4Win\plugin\AutoBuild\Files
c:\UBCD4Win\temp

Please let me know if you have any questions or comments.