How to install grub4dos on windows 7

You can also test out different splashimages — just overwrite the bmp file with a newer version whilst emulating under QEMU. You can number your entries consecutively starting from 0 or if you have a blank entry for the first menu title start from 1 1,2,3,4,etc. If you are having trouble getting the numbered menu items to work and have more than 10 entries, just remember to number the first five or so menus and make sure that you have a menu item which will be menu item 0 before menu item 1.

Menu item 0 can be a heading or a numbered 0 or un-numbered menu item, but menu item 0 must exist for the menu system to work properly when the user types the numeric keys. Also, make sure the first numbered menu items are present for example if you have 23 menu items, then menu items 0,1 and 2 must be present and numbered. If you want to have menu items numbered non-consecutively for some strange reason!

Menu entries can also be auto-numbered. This is useful is using iftitle entries see below or if you want to add extra menu entries in the middle of your menu. They can be patched out by using a grub4dos batch file.

At the start of your menu. To just have a background bitmap displayed,. You can also add passwords to the menu. Adding a password under each title entry will prompt the user for that password when that particular menu item is run. You can also encrypt your password. For example:. Note that adding a password line above the first title line also has the affect of suppressing the default grub4dos menu help text at the bottom of the screen for all menu entries.

You can also generate an MD5 hash code from the grub4dos command shell using the command md5crypt , but you will have to manually type the hash code into your menu file as you cannot cut and paste it from the grub4dos shell window! You can generate md5 hashes online here just use any salt you like. The menu below gives the user 3 seconds to press the ESC key no timeout is displayed, the screen is just blank for 3 seconds.

If ESC is not pressed, then the submenu. If a key is pressed then the timeout will stop and the main menu menu. You can also require the user to enter a password after hitting F10 in order to get to the secret hidden main menu. To determine what scan code you need for the any particular key combination, press c whilst in the grub4dos menu to get to the grub4dos command prompt, and then type.

To have a single menu which contains some hidden entries that you can only see by pressing F10, use a menu. You will need to add the hotkey utility to the root of your USB drive which can be downloaded from here. Note : To obscure the text in the menu. So before you go to the bother of reading this section, unless you really, really want to use GFXBoot, you should skip this section.

Although GFXBoot is good for providing attractive high resolution and high colour backgrounds, the menu features are limited and are not as flexible as the grub4dos menu system. Pressing F1 will produce some help mainly for linux users , F2 will allow you to change language but only English is available in the files I have provided. More info on GFXmenu can be found here. This is how to change it and have your own picture:.

The colours are specified in hexadecimal and are in three groups of two hexadecimal numbers — 0xrrggbb — 0x means that we are specifying a hex number, then we have rrggbb the first two numbers specify the red brightness, the second the green brightness and the third the blue brightness. Hexadecimal numbers can thus range from 00 which means 0 in decimal and thus off to ff which means in decimal and thus maximum brightness — here are some colours and their hexadecimal equivalents:.

Tip: You may have noticed that any error will make grub4dos go back to its default menu list when using a GFXMenu. Use the following lines at the top of the menu. Alternatively, omit the title line but not the other 4 lines of text and the grub4dos text-based menu will never be displayed — it will always load the GFXMenu, even after an error. Now you can try some of the other tutorials on this website and add an extra menu entry into your menu. Just pick any tutorial that takes your fancy and add the menu entries into your existing menu.

See the reference section at the top of this page. Note that some of these options are not available when using the GFXMenu menu system — i. I suggest that once you have your GFXMenu background working, you comment out the line for it in your menu. The instructions above should allow you to make a nice user menu, but what do the commands in the menu.

Lets look at what we have, now that you have added Ylmf to the USB drive:. What do these commands mean? The first line in each section begins with title xxxxx, and is fairly obvious! It is the text that is presented to the user as a menu item.

The second line in all these examples is a find —set-root command. Note that this command can cause problems if you happen to have the file it is looking for on both your hard disk and your USB pen. It is often better to create a file with a unique name e. When grub4dos finds the file, it sets the current search path to that path — for instance if you had. Possible devices are u,p,n,h,f,c. If no floppy drive or cd drive is present, then using the —devices switch to force grub4dos to search those devices may cause long timeouts of several minutes!

See the bottom of this page for how to avoid this. The next line is a map command. BIOS devices are numbered where are floppy disks fd0-fd3,0xx9F are hd0-hd31, cd0 is 0xA0, etc. Here are the grub4dos device references and numbers:. A detailed explanation of these map ped virtual device names and lots more can be found here. The map command takes effect when grub4dos comes to the end of a menu entry or executes the boot command.

It will also take effect immediately within grub4dos if a map —hook command is executed. It is important to understand how grub4dos maps your image. If this code tries to access a floppy disk drive, it will be accessing your image file instead. So you can map a 1. However, if you try to map memtest. Similarly, if you try to map a binary program instead of a floppy disk image as fd0 it will fail to load. The map command will cause the file specified or device to be treated as a virtual device — any access to the device will cause a block seek to the correct place in the file — for this reason the file must be contiguous i.

The best way to fix this is run WinContig. Another way to get around this, is to use the map —mem command — If you use this command the ISO file does not need to be contiguous but the whole ISO will be loaded into memory by grub4dos which will be much slower and also requires the system to have more memory.

For instance, the line. Note that if you map an ISO file or any file and the media is writable, it is possible to modify the contents of the ISO file, for instance. If you then run the same line again then it will produce. Using ;; in a line is the equivalent of splitting the line into separate command lines, i. The grub4dos map command also supports. Only works if cd device is present. If they do not boot correctly e.

Here is the menu. Next line checks to see if we booted as a hard disk 80 and if so maps the boot device as a floppy disk. Note that this also maps your internal hard disk hd1 to hd0 and so when it boots from the new floppy device fd0 , DOS will see only one hard disk your internal hard disk and one floppy disk your USB drive. The next line is map —hook. This is where any previous map commands actually become activated and hooked into the BIOS.

The map —hook command changes the BIOS interrupt pointers so that an access to the virtual device will actually access the file or device specified by the map device commands. If no map —hook command is specified in the menu, it will be automatically executed when grub4dos boots, so there is no need to use map —hook unless you need to access the mapped device first.

When setting a directory path, you must always include a device in the full path when using the root command e. It is good practice to always use root before you use chainloader , because root can establish some parameters when the device is mounted which is then used by the chainloader command. If root fails then use rootnoverify instead, e. The kernel command is an instruction to load a linux kernel which expects to be loaded into memory in a certain way; also we can pass parameters and values to the kernel by using a command line type syntax on the same menu line which will get passed to the linux kernel.

The kernel and initrd commands should always be the last two commands. If you wish to suppress the loading messages produced by kernel and initrd then precede the kernel and initrd lines with. The final line in the Ylmf menu is initrd , this is an initial ramdrive which is a temporary filesystem used in the boot process of the linux kernel — initrd and initramfs are both commonly used to make preparations before the real root filesystem can be mounted.

In this case it is set to the first partition of the virtual floppy disk drive which is the memtest As the memtest As we have mapped the whole file as a virtual floppy disk, when that boot sector code executes, it will try to access floppy disk sectors, but grub4dos has just mapped the floppy disk to the memtest Add —force if grub4dos gives an error due to a bad signature or incorrect format.

In this example, this line is actually not needed and the USB drive will boot to memtest without this line. Using root fd0 would fail though Error cannot mount selected partition.

When grub4dos finishes a sequence of commands in a menu. To check if a file is contiguous from within grub4dos, use the blocklist command. In the grub4dos menu, type C to get to the grub4dos command prompt and then use the blocklist command as shown below:. With grub4dos, you can have multiple menus. The menu shown below will allow the user to load one of three sub-menus.

TAG which you should place on the grub4dos boot drive. TAG anywhere, then it looks for menu. System memory locations can be read and obtained as a grub4dos variable like this:. The value obtained and placed in the variable m will be a bit 8 byte value.

Often you may wish to read the value of a single byte, word or dword 4 bytes , you can do this as follows. The md memory drive is directly mapped to system memory also. Note : The physical memory address range from 1M to 32M is reserved for grub4dos internal code and data. The default drive number for rd is 0x7F which is a floppy device.

Note that the ram drive base address will be set to the top of available memory by the map command regardless of what rd-base has been set. In and later versions of grub4dos, you can precede dd with the raw command which will prevent auto-decompression.

Normally rd-size is set to 0x 4GB by grub4dos. You do not need to change rd-size it in normal use. If you do change it, set it back to 0x afterwards. Recent versions of grub4dos see near end of the grub4dos readme file for more details also have the ability to set and use variables.

Variable names can be a maximum of 8 characters. If a 9-character name is used it will be shortened to 8 characters, e. Note:This example only works if you are using a version of grub4dos that treats ;; as a comment delimiter.

Note : The version of grldr treats ;; the same as if there was a carriage return in the menu. The debug off stops the result of the set calculation from being displayed on the screen. You could instead redirect to nul — e. Later versions of grub4dos have enhanced cat parameters which allow you to replace strings. Use doublequotes if you need a space or tab character, e. Strings can be enclosed in double-quotes if they contain spaces, e.

Note: If md 0x contains a compressed file e. Note: If using cat —hex, it may not always work if the first few bytes appear to resemble a compressed file header to grub4dos. In this case cat —hex will not output anything at all in pre-September versions of grub4dos!!! To always view the exact byte content a memory area or file, turn off the grub4dos decompression translation using:. In and later versions of grub4dos, you can prepend commands like dd or cat with the raw command — e.

The maximum size returned by retval is Grub4dos Installer 1 1 Manual grub4dos tutorial, guide, manual, wallpaper, background, commands, bitmap, Grub4dos Installer 1 1 is a basic media player. Grub4dos free download. X64 Grub4dos 64 bit download - x64 - X bit Download - xbit download - freeware, shareware and software downloads. It is always recommended not to Shutdown the computer when updates are getting installed on your computer, doing this might cause serious problem to your computer.

If you are having single operating system that is Windows 10 on your computer follow the below method to fix your issue. Note: If you wish, you can modify the BCD so that it contains several boot choices.

To do this you will need to modify the makepxe. For example script modifications see here. It would be easier however to use grub4dos as a menu system and then choose which boot. If you like you can change the winpe. See here for lots more grub4dos menu. You can then run Windows Setup. Then you can easily restore any image at any time in the future. Make a working WinPE3 boot.

You may need to wait a while for the network to start up, or you can type netcfg -winpe to force the network to start. Check you can access files on the master PC — e. I suggest you place a copy of ImageX. We can make an image of the OS that is on the hard disk using the command…. If we want to apply this image to the same PC in the future maybe the contents have become corrupted then we follow steps 1 to 4 above, but now we type:. Note that ImageX is a single-file instancing compression utility, so you can simply add another backup to the current backup file using the Append ImageX command at a later date:.

Now image 2 will have this new backup and the wim file will only be slightly larger as it will only contain the new files that you added since the last backup. Well, first you will need to have made a backup of both the boot partition and the OS partition and any other partitions you want to backup. In the case of Win 7 and most Vista systems there is a hidden boot partition on the disk. Look for the Active: Yes entry — if it says Active then this is your boot partition as well as your system OS partition so you only need to back up that partition to be able to boot the OS!

If it says Active: No then you need to find the active partition and back that up too. Let us assume you have lost all the contents of the hard disk on your notebook win7 but you have a backup on the main PC of the C: OS drive — here is what to do to get it running again:. You will first need to copy bcdboot. Now type wpeutil reboot and it should reboot to your newly installed OS.

Now you can keep backups of all your PCs and notebooks hard disk volumes keep a copy of the wim files on an external hard disk as well, just in case your main PC catches fire!

If you prefer to PXE boot to a syslinux menu rather than a grub4dos menu, there are some instructions here. Just download the diskless. The instructions are for a linux based diskless workstation to run a distributed computing project, but you can put whatever files you like in the default menu as long as you set the boot file to pxelinux.

Then change the Boot Order so that Network is at the top of the list. You should see something similar to that shown below:. If you can see that some packets were received, check that the TFTP options are correct try setting PXE compatibility instead of Option negotiation — but if it does not work remember to set it back to Option negotiation again afterwards as most setups only work with this set.

PXE booting starts but hangs when loading a large boot file e. For more PXE error codes see here. You can setup. You need to configure a dhcp server and a tftp server. In the dhcp server, use. You may also want to load a different menu. You must use —mem option if you want to map a file in the pxe device. When you use chainloader to load file from the pxe device, there is a option. Option —raw works just like —force, but it loads the file in one go. This can.