Sunday 13 March 2016

Protecting animated E2B menus with passwords

I have found a way to password-protect menus on E2B and still have the animation playing in the background.


The DNA animation starts once the menu has been built by E2B and it then prompts you for a password with the animation still rotating on the display. A large 24-pixel high font has been used with the E2B default 800x600 background in this example.

Saturday 12 March 2016

Using E2B with the datAshur Personal encrypted USB flash drive

I have been looking at how to protect a USB Flash drive recently including encrypted USB drives. Some models (the cheapest) just provide a data encryption program to make an encrypted folder on the USB drive.

Others comprise of two 'devices', one is a CD containing the encryption software and the other is the Flash storage volume (similar to U3 USB drives).

Neither of these types are suitable to support USB booting because we need the BIOS to be able to read the unencrypted drive sectors on power up.

Another type of encrypted USB drive is the type that has a PIN keypad. This type encrypts the data as it comes in or out of the USB drive. The data is stored in an encrypted form on the flash memory, but any external device will 'see' the unencrypted data (if the correct PIN is used).

I found several models of encrypted USB Flash drives that require a PIN number to unlock them. There seems to be only four different ones however, as many of them appear to be re-badged\re-branded versions of the same thing:

Friday 11 March 2016

MPI Tool Kit v0.064 available (with important bugfix)

I found a bug in MPI Tool Kit - if you try Clover booting then it 'breaks' the syslinux boot option and you can no longer MBR boot!

Adding Tails to E2B

Tails 5.1.1 (and many other versions)

For MBR legacy boot from the ISO (DVD) file, use an extension of _.isodef.iso and E2B v2.14 or later.
For UEFI, use agFM and in the Tails grub2 menu, if you have a USB HDD, choose the 'Tails (External Hard Disk) option.

Tails 4.2, 4.6 4.28, etc.

Also see here for UEFI boot and later Tails versions with E2B .mnu support.

Tails 3.16

The Tails ISO can be downloaded from here. You can download via the Torrent or download the ISO directly.

E2B will boot from a Tails ISO on a real system from a Removable E2B Flash drive.

Booting from ISO under a Virtual Machine will not work if the VM sees the USB drive as a 'virtual IDE/SCSI hard disk. (E2B v2.14+ will boot Tails ISOs on both Removable and Fixed USB drives however).

If your E2B USB drive is a 'fixed-disk' type, then you can convert the Tails ISO to a .imgPTN file. Ensure that 'live-media=removable' is not in the kernel cheat code line (press TAB in the syslinux Tails boot menu to see the boot parameters). The latest versions of the MPI Tool Kit should remove this cheat code for you if you choose AUTO-CORRECT=Y.

The persistence option in the Desktop menu system cannot be used because Tails will only create the persistence volume on a USB drive that has been installed using Tails (has a GPT partitions with a volume name of 'Tails' - possibly only works on Removable USB media?) and so has the correct partition structure.

Tails 2

The Tails 2.2 ISO can be downloaded from here. You can download via the Torrent or use FireFox and download the ISO directly.

The Tails 1.0 and later ISOs cannot run with persistence now (unlike earlier 0.xx versions). Tails 1.0+ looks for a GPT disk and an EFI volume labelled 'Tails' (see here and here), so you must make a dedicated GPT USB Flash drive for Tails if you want persistence. If the drive wasn't 'made by Tails installer' then it will refuse to create a persistent file system for you.

If you boot from the ISO (even in E2B), you cannot install Tails to a new flash drive because Tails will only install if it is running from a USB FAT32 drive. This is a real pain!

Tuesday 8 March 2016

E2B v1.78m Beta

Because grub4dos can accept up to 32-pixel high characters (I have only tested 24 so far), I have now deprecated the FONT24 variable and instead we should use FONTH=24 to use 24-pixel high fonts in E2B:

Example 1 (default)
# use E2B default 24-pixel high fonts (loads simplified Chinese + terminalbold.f24)
set FONTH=24

Monday 7 March 2016

How to boot Clonezilla (and other stuff) from your E2B USB drive even if it does not have Clonezilla on it!

iPXE is an internet boot protocol. It allows you to download into memory and then run various payloads (ISOs) from the internet. This means you can boot stuff without it even needing to be on your USB boot drive.

You can add the iPXE boot ISOs to E2B and when you boot, they will connect to the internet (you need a network connection on that computer) and then download a menu.

To get started, just add the netboot.xyz.iso file to your \_ISO\MAINMENU folder and run it.
The current list of supported downloads is here.

Saturday 5 March 2016

E2B v1.78l Beta

Wonko (from reboot.pro) has provided some large 'European' font files for use with the FONT24 variable in E2B. They seem to support the various E2B languages OK including Russian (let me know if there are any characters missing!).

More fonts may follow!

New changes since last E2B v1.78k are:

  • Extra xxxx24 font files have been added to the \_ISO\e2b\grub folder (the font file sft has been renamed to sft24, and yxt to yxt24).
  • The \_ISO\docs\Templates\LargeFonts\MyE2B.cfg file has been updated - it now uses the new terminalbold24 font file (copy it to the \_ISO folder to use it).
  • Latest version of grub4dos added (still a few niggly bugs though).
  • \_ISO\docs\E2B Utilities\Protect\Protect.cmd script added.
The Protect.cmd script can be used to protect your \_ISO\MyE2B.cfg file. It uses cacls to remove permissions (so not accessible), sets the hidden and system attributes and compresses the file using LZMA to make it less human-readable. The file will only be accessible to it's 'owner', Protect.cmd also unprotects the file if you wish (but only if you are the owner).



If you edit the Protect.cmd file, you can change the cacls setting so that the only person that can access the file under Windows, is you, the 'owner' (i.e. someone who has logged on to your system with your account login or your Domain login). This makes it very secure (on Windows systems) but might be inconvenient.

It is not impossible for an Administrator to gain access to the file however, if they know how!

Thursday 3 March 2016

E2B v1.78k

This version has the latest grub4dos which fixes a few small bugs in previous Beta versions (in particular if you are using the FONT24 feature).

Wednesday 2 March 2016

E2B v1.78j with large font support

Recent versions of grub4dos 0.4.6a support 24x24 pixel fonts.

I have added two font hex files to E2B v1.78j and also added some menu support for it.
The two font files added are fxt and sft (traditional Chinese and simplified Chinese, I think?) - they also support English characters but not other language characters, because they do not contain any special characters such as umlaut Ü, etc.. Also, the odd English character may be missing too, e.g. ~.

Because these font are bigger, it means there are less rows and columns on the screen.

800x600   = 33 columns by 25 rows
1024x768 = 42 columns by 32 rows

Tuesday 1 March 2016

E2B v1.78i Beta available

This version has the latest \grldr grub4dos 0.4.6a file (not the final version yet but seems to be fully working).
The splashimage --animated command now supports up to 999 animation frames.
The frame file names can be in  xxxxxx01.bmp format or xxxxx001.bmp format.
You can download the new DNA_Animation.zip file and add it to E2B v1.78i. It will now display all 120 frames of the rotating DNA model in a smooth continuous loop.
I have also added a 'ls' menu entry to the Utilities Menu in v1.78i.