Grub4dos instructions for use. Creating a bootable GRUB4DOS flash drive with grubinst. Grub4Dos: how to use the program

1. Before starting the operation, it is recommended to format the USB flash drive with the HPUSBFW program (369Kb), after saving everything you need from it (if any)
2. Download this file: GRUB4DOS_RUS_v.2
3. Run it. After starting, select (using the Browse button) the target, that is, the device on which we will install the Bootloader.
It's either a hard drive or flash drive.
If we are going to put on a USB flash drive, then we select the root of the flash drive X: \
(X is the letter of your flash drive)
If we are going to install on the Hard disk, then select the root of the C:\ drive (or whichever you want, the main thing is to be Active)

4. Click the "Extract" button. After that, the Grub4Dos Installer 1.1 program will be installed to you in C:\Program Files and throw a shortcut on the Desktop. At the same time, the bootloader files will be unpacked to the media of your choice (Folder - Boot; Files - grldr, MEMDISK, MENU.LST) and the Grub4Dos Installer 1.1 program window will open.

5. In the Grub4Dos Installer 1.1 program window, in the topmost line (drop-down menu), select the target for installing the bootloader
(HDD or Flash Drive) You don't have to choose anything else.

6. Click the Install button.
7. If everything is successful, then you will see a console window prompting you to press Enter, Press Enter.

Warning! If you are going to install the Bootloader on your Hard Disk, you should first get some experience with the GRUB4DOS Bootloader, know how the Menu.lst file is edited, etc. You can read about this and.
Menu.lst configuration file by default contains menu items for booting from the first partition, the first hard drive, if your OS is installed elsewhere, and you install the Bootloader according to this instruction without knowing how to boot the OS from another partition, you will encounter difficulties.
So if you're not sure, don't install GRUB4DOS on your hard drive first.

Lightweight and versatile Grub4dos bootloader. As far as I know, there are two versions of this bootloader, the first for installation on optical discs and the second on flash drives (which will be discussed). The Russian assembly of Grub4dos is the same version of this bootloader (Grub4dos v 0.4.6a), only the installer and the Russification of the boot menu have been changed. Well, now in detail: version Grub4dos v 0.4.6a supports file systems: NTFS, FAT, FAT32, EXT, a more stable version. Installation process. 1.Download the archive file and unpack it anywhere, except for the flash drive where the bootloader will be installed. 2. Run the batch file setup.cmd.

Next, press enter and the menu appears: 1 - Format USB HPUSBFW RUS, 2 - GRUB4DOS Installer Installer, 3 - Copy files to USB copy files USB, 4 - Help Help, 0 - Exit Quit. From the beginning, format the USB flash drive (ATTENTION AFTER FORMATTING ALL DATA ON THE MEDIA WILL BE DESTROYED !!!). Be careful when choosing a device, otherwise you may mistakenly format the wrong device.

In order not to accidentally install a boot entry on the wrong disk (especially for the system hard drive, if you install this entry, the operating system will not boot). There are two ways: the first volume of the hard drive is much larger than the volume of the flash drive, the second, if many flash drives are connected to the computer at the same time, then you can determine the one you need by the amount of memory or turn off flash drives that are unnecessary in operation. Since the boot record was installed, the next step is copying the files (extracting files from the 7z-SFX archive).

The archive contains the files necessary for work and 61 backgrounds and screenshots for them (59 pcs.) (you can use the screenshots as a background on your desktop if you wish). Additionally. You can edit the boot menu file menu.lst (opens with notepad) as you wish, if you need help open the Help RUS.chm help file. There are two versions of this file: the first is in the gfx folder, and the second is in the root of the flash drive. If you wanted to edit them, then the first one is UTF-8 encoded, the second one is OEM-866. For the download example, some parameters are already written in them. Your task is only to correct the path to the file you want to download. If you did everything correctly, then restart the computer and go into the BIOS and select your USB flash drive as the first device. After loading the USB flash drive, you will see the boot menu.

Installation from Windows.

The menu that you will see after installing the bootloader, booting from a USB flash drive

2. Download this file: Grub4DoS_GUI(845 Kb)
(Russified version of the bootloader from dedjafor advanced)

3. Run it. After starting, select (using the Browse button) the target, that is, the device on which we will install the Bootloader.
It's either a hard drive or flash drive.

If we are going to put on a USB flash drive, then we select the root of the flash drive X: \
(X - The letter of your flash drive)

If we are going to install on the Hard disk, then select the root of the C:\ drive (or whichever you want, the main thing is to be "Active")

This installer is made to speed up the installation of the bootloader, just follow the instructions and the installation will not take even a minute.

4. Click the "Extract" button. After that the program Grub4Dos Installer 1.1 will be installed to you C:\Program Files and throw a shortcut on the desktop. At the same time, the bootloader files will be unpacked to the media of your choice (Folder - Boot; Files - grldr, Menu.lst) and the program window will open Grub4Dos Installer 1.1.

5. In the program window Grub4Dos Installer 1.1, in the very top line (drop-down menu), select the target for installing the bootloader
(HDD or Flash Drive) You don't have to choose anything else.

Grub4Dos Installer - Grub4DOS installer for Windows
Works correctly under XP

6. Press the button Install.

7. If everything is successful, then you will see a console window prompting you to press Enter, Press Enter.

Will disappear after pressing Enter

Installing the bootloader is filmed on video. You can see how simple this operation is.

Warning! If you are going to install the Bootloader on your Hard Drive, you should first get some experience with the Bootloader GRUB4DOS, know how the file is edited Menu.lst etc.. You can read about this and.
In the config file Menu.lst by default, menu items are registered for booting from the first partition, the first hard drive, if your OS installed elsewhere, and you install the Bootloader according to this instruction without knowing how to boot the OS from another partition - you will run into difficulties.
So if you are not sure, you should not first install GRUB4DOS to the hard drive.
If you are an advanced user and have installed the Bootloader on your hard drive, please read

You already know what a "powerful" tool Grub4Dos is and how many different features it provides. Now you would like to boot it from a hard drive with Windows XP/Vista/7/8 installed on it by selecting Grub4Dos from the Windows bootloader menu.

In this article, I'll show you how to add an entry to the boot menu without changing the default bootloader (in WinXP it's ntldr and boot.ini config file, in WinVista/7/8 it's bootmgr with BCD config base). I will introduce you to the tools for working with the BCD conf.base, namely, the console utility built into WinVista / 7/8 - bcdedit, and the program with a GUI interface from NeoSmart Technologies - EasyBCD. I will also give a script for automatically adding a Grub4Dos entry to the OS boot menu.

Consider 2 situations:

1. We have WinXP and its bootloader ntldr .
2. We have Windows XP/Vista/7/8 with modern original bootmgr.

Let's start simple:
Adding Grub4Dos to the Windows XP Boot Menu.

1. Download the latest Grub4Dos.
2. Unpack grldr and menu.lst from the downloaded archive to the root of the active disk (you can go to another place, but then you will have to prescribe other paths).
3. Edit boot.ini. Add to the end of the file:

C:\grldr="Grub4Dos"

As a result, we get the boot.ini file with the following content:

We can also change the time and item loaded by default.
We reboot and now we can select Grub4Dos.

Note:
In menu.lst, I would definitely return to this boot menu as the first item, i.e.:

Title Boot HDD0
chainloader (hd0)+1
rootnoverify (hd0)

Adding Grub4Dos to the Windows Vista/7/8 boot menu.

So, we have a bootmgr bootloader through which other OSes are loaded. It installs with WinVista/7/8. The most understandable tool for working with it is the EasyBCD program. It will not be difficult to master it, everything is simple and clear. But it doesn't provide the same functionality as the bcdedit console utility. Therefore, I will show you how to work with it.

1. Before proceeding with editing the boot configuration, I advise you to prepare a system recovery disk, because incorrect actions can lead to the inability to boot the OS. Also, to restore boot information, I advise you to refer to this article.
2. Boot into Windows Vista/7/8.
3. Download the latest Grub4Dos.
4. Unpack grldr.mbr, grldr and menu.lst from the downloaded archive to the root of the disk containing the BCD storage (you can also go to another place, but then you will have to prescribe other paths), usually this is the active main partition with the bootmgr bootloader.
5. Run command line as administrator.
6. Create a BCD backup:

bcdedit /export C:\BCD.bak

So that in which case you can restore to the initial state with the command:

bcdedit /import C:\BCD.bak

7. Create a new entry named "Grub4Dos" in the boot configuration data store:

Bcdedit /create /d "Grub4Dos" /application bootsector

8. In response, we will receive the id of the created record, which we will substitute in the next three commands for the place (id):

Bcdedit /set (id) device partition=C:
bcdedit /set (id) path\grldr.mbr

Bcdedit /displayorder (id) /addlast

9. Let's see what happened. We enter the bcdedit command without parameters:

I ended up with the following (besides Win7 I have an entry with WinXP):

10. Exit the command line. We restart the PC. We see that we now have the ability to load Grub4Dos from the OS boot menu.

I'll tell you about a few more options for the bcdedit command:

Deleting an entry with the specified (id):
bcdedit /delete (id)
- Change the name of the entry with the specified (id):
bcdedit /set (id) description "New name"
- Setting the system with the specified (id) bootable by default:
bcdedit /default (id)
- Timeout setting:
bcdedit /timeoutXX
where XX is the time in seconds.

Script to automatically add Grub4Dos to the Windows XP/Vista/7/8 boot menu.

This script allows you to automatically detect the OS, and, depending on the system, works with the bootloader configuration files.

To run it, download this archive. Unpack it to drive C: (active drive with system and bootloader). And run as administrator.

The archive consists of the following files:

grldr - the grub4dos bootloader itself

grldr.mbr - boot sector record (looks for grldr in the root of disks and transfers control to it)

install.bat - the script itself

libiconv2.dll - libraries of the sed program

libintl3.dll - libraries of the sed program

menu.lst - grub4dos conf file

The install.bat script has the following content:

@echo off
ver | find "XP" > null if %ERRORLEVEL% == 0 goto ver_xp
goto ver_vista
:: Windows XP :ver_xp
:: Backup attrib -R -H -S c:\boot.ini copy c:\boot.ini c:\boot.ini.bak
:: Check if installed findstr /L grldr "c:\boot.ini" > nul
:: Add boot entry echo C:\grldr="GRUB4DOS" >> "c:\boot.ini"
:: create restore.bat file for XPecho attrib -R -H -S "c:\boot.ini" >> restore.batecho %CD%\sed -ri "/grldr/d" "c:\boot.ini" >> restore.batecho %CD%\sed -ri "s/$/\r/" "c:\boot.ini" >> restore.bat
goto END
:: Windows Vista :ver_vista
:: Check if installed Set BCDEDIT=C:\windows\System32\bcdedit.exe%BCDEDIT% /enum | findstr /L grldr > nul if %ERRORLEVEL% == 0 goto END
:: Backup %BCDEDIT% /export "C:\BCD.bak" attrib +H +S C:\BCD.bak
:: Add boot entry Set GUIDFILE=bcdguid.txt %BCDEDIT% /create /d "GRUB4DOS" /application bootsector > %GUIDFILE%sed -ri "s/[^(]*([^)]+)).*/\1/" %GUIDFILE% set /p GUID=< %GUIDFILE%
%BCDEDIT% /set %GUID% device partition=%SYSTEMDRIVE%%BCDEDIT% /set %GUID% path \grldr.mbr%BCDEDIT% /displayorder %GUID% /addlast
:: create restore.bat file for Vistaecho %BCDEDIT% /delete %GUID% >> restore.bat
goto END
:END

That's all. I hope this article was useful to you, click one of the buttons below to tell your friends about it.

Updated: 19.05.2015 - 12:16

Bootloader for x86(-64) operating systems.
GRUB4DOS Toolbox for Windows is a set of GUI tools to ease the process of installing, configuring and removing the bootloader.

Requirements:

1. Try to install only new versions.
2. Windows 2000 or higher. The toolkit can be run on older versions, but there is no guarantee.
3. GRUB4DOS can only be installed on 32-bit versions of Windows because the main bootlace.com will not work in a 64-bit environment. (64-bit Windows users who wish to use bootlace.com can try ).
4. Administrative privileges are required only for disk access.

GRUB4DOS Features

1. Installing GRUB4DOS on a disk, partition, or disk image. This feature requires the bootlace.com utility from GRUB4DOS, which is only compatible with 32-bit Windows. GRUB4DOS can be installed in the disk's boot sector (MBR), in appropriate places on the disk, or in a disk image file. Disk images are often used to run one operating system inside another, using emulators such as Qemu, VirtualBOX, Vmware, and others.
2. DD data between disks, partitions or image files. This is an implementation of the main features of the dd program, available for almost all operating systems. This feature is designed to copy data from a disk/partition to a file, from a file to a disk/partition, or from a file to a file for backup. For example, installed with GRUB4DOS Toolbox for Windows, GRUB4DOS can be removed by restoring the image file to disk.
3. Adding the GRUB4DOS multiboot menu to the WIndows multiboot menu (Vista/2008 and above). This feature depends on the built-in Windows bcdedit utility. For Windows XP/2000/2003 there is no such function and manual editing of the boot.ini file is required.
4. Configuring the menu.lst file. This is generally rarely required by advanced users.
5. Getting the UUID of mounted partitions. This is useful for writing a more robust menu.lst for GRUB4DOS.

Installing GRUB4DOS from GNU/Linux:
dd if=grldr.mbr of=/dev/sdb bs=446 count=1
dd if=grldr.mbr of=/dev/sdb seek=512 skip=512 bs=1