Saturday 29 July 2017

E2B v1.95a BETA available

Change History here
Download from the Alternate Download Areas as usual (see side panel of blog for link).
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Sunday 23 July 2017

Reduce the CPU load when using the E2B Menu

You may have noticed that when you boot to the E2B menu, your CPU fan speed may start to increase and get quite noisy. This can also occur when booting to the E2B menu under a Virtual Machine such as with Virtual Box.

The reason is that grub4dos is continually calling the BIOS to detect a menu key press from the user and so the CPU is running at full speed.

Most operating systems use an interrupt-driven approach. The CPU is in an idle state when not required, until the user presses a key and causes a CPU interrupt from the keyboard controller which then wakes up the CPU.

e.g. (in x86 code)...
sti           (enable interrupts)
hlt           (stop CPU until it gets an interrupt)

Grub4dos can also use such an interrupt-driven approach if you patch it...

In the \_ISO\Sample_MyE2B.cfg file you will see the lines:

# Use HLT instruction to reduce CPU cycles whilst waiting for keypress (stops CPU from getting too hot)
### write --bytes=1 0x8205 0x20 > nul

Simply uncomment the 2nd line by removing the three ### symbols and add it to your \_ISO\MyE2B.cfg file:

!BAT
# Use HLT instruction to reduce CPU cycles whilst waiting for keypress (stops CPU from getting too hot)
write --bytes=1 0x8205 0x20 > nul

As this patch may cause problems on some systems, it is not included by default in E2B. You may find it useful if you use E2B with a VM a lot.

You can remove or comment out the line to go back to the normal grub4dos behaviour if it causes you any problems (let me know if it does!).

Add i-life Windows OS re-installation payloads to E2B

i-life produce a range of laptops including the ZEDNotes.

It is possible to download the full OS re-installation files + firmware update software (e.g. ZEDNOTE 11.6.rar, 4.5GB) from the appropriate Support page for your particular i-life notebook...

Saturday 22 July 2017

E2B v1.94 full release is now available

v1.94 2017-07-21

  • Bugfix for TXT_Maker.exe as iftitle caused a 'no title' in .txt file error. 
  • Change_drive_Letter.cmd added to allow you to change 2nd partition drive letter on Removable Flash drive
  • Sample mnu files for linux ext3 comment added
  • .iso32 and .iso64 allowed in \_ISO\WINDOWS\xxxxx menu folders
  • Latest grub4dos \grldr 2017-06-25
  • Latest ImDisk driver
  • Spanish kbd now addded if Spanish language selected
  • Czech language (Beta) added
Available from Alternate Download Areas (will be added to E2B website in a few days).

Tuesday 11 July 2017

E2B v1.94c BETA available

The main difference is that I have added a Czech language option.

However, the translations have not been checked by a Czech and so they are probably full of errors!

Monday 3 July 2017

Czech language for E2B (Beta)

I have used Google Translate to make a very Beta version for the Czech language which you can download from here.  You can test it by simply copying the STRINGS.txt and F1.cfg files to your E2B USB drive's \_ISO folder.

The files are probably a bit of a wreck, so, if any Czech tech can check and make them up to spec (see what I did there?), then please send me a corrected version!

Info: How to make new language files E2B page here.

Sunday 2 July 2017

E2B v1.94b BETA available

Changes from release version 1.93A are:

  • bugfix - if TXT_Maker.exe is used with iftitle, it caused a 'no title in .txt file' error.
  • Change_drive_letter.cmd added to allow you to change 2nd partition drive letter on Removable Flash drive if using Windows 10 1703
  • Sample mnu files for linux - 'use ext3' comment line added
  • .iso32 and .iso64 now allowed in \_ISO\WINDOWS\xxxxx menu folders (except XP folder)
  • latest grub4dos \grldr 2017-06-25
  • latest ImDisk driver for loading Windows ISOs

Available from alternate download areas as usual.

Friday 30 June 2017

'Kill switch\vaccine' for latest Petya\NotPetya ransomware found

A report on Bleeping Computer says that a way to prevent infection by the latest NotPetya ransomware is to create a read-only file at C:\Windows\perfc.

You can do this by downloading and running this file as Administrator.

I have no idea if it works, but if your organisation has un-updated/unpatched systems, this could be useful to prevent your disk from being encrypted.

As I suspected, virus developers will build in some sort of 'kill switch' to prevent their own systems from getting infected, as with WannaCry. I guess it's kinda difficult to write code and test it, only to find that the code has just encrypted all your source files and the decryption algorithm is not yet working! The Wannacry vaccine was coded to find a specific web server which meant it could be easily stopped by setting up a server of the correct name. The Petya developers obviously did not want to use the same mechanism, which was discovered and then used as a global 'kill switch', and so have used a local file instead to stop infection.

Thursday 29 June 2017

Installing 32-bit and 64-bit Windows ISOs with E2B

A user had Windows 10 32-bit and 64-bit ISO files in his \_ISO\WINDOWS\WIN10 folder.

We can make a .txt file for each .ISO file so that if the system CPU that we are booting from is a 32-bit CPU then only the 32-bit ISO will be listed in the Windows 10 menu. If the CPU is a 64-bit CPU then we can show only the 64-bit ISO file in the menu.

See here for details.

However, this user wanted to only show the 32-bit ISO if the system has <4GB of memory and only show the 64-bit ISO if the system has more than 4GB of memory.

The way around this was to create a new variable (GB4) in our \_ISO\MyE2B.cfg file:

# set 4GB variable if 4GB+ of memory present
set /a M=*0x8298 & 0xffffffff>>10+1 > nul ;; set /a M1=*0x82c0>>10+1 > nul ;; set /a M=%M% + %M1% > nul ;; if %M%>=4096 set GB4=1 ;; set M= ;; set M1=

We can now test for the existence of the variable GB4 in our .txt file:

Example:
We have a Windows10_x86.iso and a Windows10_x64.iso:
\_ISO\WINDOWS\WIN10\Windows10_x86.iso
\_ISO\WINDOWS\WIN10\Windows10_x64.iso

If a system has more than 4GB of memory, only show the 64-bit Windows ISO (it must have a 64-bit CPU if it detects >4GB). If it has less than 4GB we only show 32-bit Windows ISO.
 
Windows10_x64.txt
iftitle [if exist GB4] Win10 1703 x64\n Install 64-bit Windows 10

Windows10_x86.txt
iftitle [if not exist GB4] Win10 1703 x86\n Install 32-bit Windows 10

Note: There is a bug in E2B which causes a 'no title keyword found in xxxx.txt file' error when the Windows menu loads. This can be fixed by saving the .txt file as ANSI encoded instead of UTF-8 encoded - OR update your E2B drive with E2B v1.94a (beta) which has a bugfix for this.

Sunday 25 June 2017

MPI Tool Kit v0.077 now available

This version has two small changes:
1. Latest RMPartUSB.exe in the e2b folder
2. MakePartImage.cmd will now not  copy some 'special' files and folders when you use a USB drive as the source to make the .imgPTN file.

The excluded files/folders include $recycle.bin, pagefile.sys, hiberfil.sys, System Volume Information, etc. which often cause problems when copying under Windows.

To upgrade, download and extract the new MPI_Tool_Pack_Plus_CloverLite_077 folder to your Desktop and run CreateDesktopShortcuts.cmd. You can then delete the old MPI_Tool_Pack_Plus_CloverLite_0xx folder from your desktop.