Using EasyBCD's BIOS Extender

[John B. Smith]

After my last bout with Kaspersky's Rescue Disk on my CDROM drive, and
its' frustrating failure to download new virus definitions, I decided
to put Kaspersky on a flashdrive as per instructions on their site.
Then I could just throw a new Kaspersky .iso onto it whenever I want
fresh definitions. I ordered 2 Kingston USB flashdrives (wow they have
gotten really cheap!). I rebooted, went into BIOS and tried to figure
out how to boot from it. I THOUGHT I'd successfully done that before
to boot DOS or something or other. But now I think I must have
remembered wrong cause I don't think my 2008 Abit motherboard's BIOS
can do this. I got another bright idea and thought I might be able to
boot the Kaspersky USB flashdrive from the BCDE menu where I choose
WinXP or Win7. From XP I ran EasyBCD2.3 and found there's an option to
install PLoP, "Easy BCD's biosextender can be used to boot from a
network, cd or usb on computers that don't natively support it"
Installing PLoP creates a 3rd menu option at bootup. When I choose USB
it just goes into lala land.
So... my question: anybody tried this PLoP? Anybody have any other
idea about how I could boot a USB Kasperky's Rescue disk if I can't
make my native BIOS do it?

[Paul]

You need the "Popup boot menu" key.

There are two ways to select a drive.

1) Enter the BIOS and make a permanent change
to the boot order. This is... inconvenient.

2) On my Asus, the BIOS entry key is <Del> and the
popup boot is F8. On my laptop, popup boot is F11.
The popup boot presents a menu of storage devices.
You select the device desired from the menu, and off
it goes. You have to hammer the F8 key at the appropriate
time (so timing is important). If you're too late,
F8 can get an old OS into Safe Mode :-( Depending on
what key they decided to use, and the timing window
involved, this can be super-easy, or moderately
hard to get right. I can never get my laptop to do
the right thing on the first try, and the key entry
window is 1 second wide on it. Your USB key will be
in the menu.

If you disable the "splash screen" in the BIOS, such that
the machine boots "with text showing", there is usually
a single line of info there documenting the BIOS entry
key and the popup boot menu key. There are some computer
manuals which neglect all the details, and then you have
to fend for yourself.

If you mention the model number of your Abit, I can check
my small collection of manuals to see if it is there. I
don't know if there is still an Abit manual archive around
or not.

*******

I can never find an actual good looking example of
a popup boot, and the text in these examples is usually
lame and not like your PC at all. In any case, the
*decorations* around the outside of this BIOS level
window, are always the same. Almost as if it's a
standard of some sort.

"Popup boot"

http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E19127-01/ultra27.ws/821-0171/images/7-2-Boot-Device-Menu.gif

Note that, on UEFI machines (your machine is a bit old
for UEFI), the storage devices can appear twice in the
list. Once with a "let's try UEFI" option for the
storage device, the other with a "let's try legacy BIOS"
option for booting. If you know your OS was installed
in legacy (CSM compatibility enabled) mode, then you would
select the non-UEFI entry in the menu. My single example
of a UEFI machine here, shows two entries for each drive.
The machine I'm typing on, is from the same era as
yours, has a popup boot, but is not UEFI ("New BIOS")
equipped.

Popup boot appeared about a year after the first
USB2 programming window appeared in BIOS designs.
Whenever that was :-) Back in those days, you
could do cool things like change the storage emulation
used for USB2 devices, to suit your purpose. Modern
machines don't bother to do that any more. They're
probably always using some sort of hard drive emulation.

If your machine was missing popup boot, then... this
project is not going to be easy at all. I have three
or four machines without popup boot, so USB flash keys
are going to be a problem. I won't be booting a
Kaspersky USB key on my 440BX based Win98 machine.
(It's got USB 1.1 ports I think.)

Paul

[Mike Easter]

John B. Smith wrote:
> So... my question: anybody tried this PLoP? Anybody have any other
> idea about how I could boot a USB Kasperky's Rescue disk if I can't
> make my native BIOS do it?

I use Plop all the time on one of my machines. I got plop from its
website; it is so tiny that you can put it on a floppy, or alternatively
on the hdd as the boot manager or on a CD.

I put mine on a boot CD and it works just fine.

https://www.plop.at/en/bootmanagers.html

--
Mike Easter

[John B. Smith]

On Fri, 16 Sep 2016 17:49:53 -0400, Paul <nos...@needed.invalid>
wrote:

My motherboard is Abit IP35ProXE
I'm pretty sure no pop up load key, can't find in manual, never hit by
accident. I have done a Safe Boot with F8.
booting choices:
floppy, ls120, harddisk, sata cdrom
zip100/250, usb-fdd, usb zip/ls,
legacy lan
disable

I thought fdd was flash disk drive, but doesn't boot the Kaspersy.
The PLoP boot does get as far as choosing USB. It finds 2 'hosts' then
stalls.

[B00ze]

On 2016-09-16 17:49, Paul <nos...@needed.invalid> wrote:

> If you disable the "splash screen" in the BIOS, such that
> the machine boots "with text showing", there is usually
> a single line of info there documenting the BIOS entry
> key and the popup boot menu key. There are some computer
> manuals which neglect all the details, and then you have
> to fend for yourself.

Some motherboard BIOSes, like my Asus ROG, do not support the "Pop-Up
Boot Menu" if you disable the stupid boot logo. That's right, I can
press F8 for the boot menu ONLY if I DO NOT enable the good'ol text mode
BIOS boot screen. Kinda annoying...

Regards,

--
! _\|/_ Sylvain / B00...@hotmail.com
! (o o) Member:David-Suzuki-Fdn/EFF/Red+Cross/SPCA/Planetary-Society
oO-( )-Oo Lead me not into temptation (I can find the way myself).

[Paul]

B00ze wrote:
> On 2016-09-16 17:49, Paul <nos...@needed.invalid> wrote:
>
>> If you disable the "splash screen" in the BIOS, such that
>> the machine boots "with text showing", there is usually
>> a single line of info there documenting the BIOS entry
>> key and the popup boot menu key. There are some computer
>> manuals which neglect all the details, and then you have
>> to fend for yourself.
>
> Some motherboard BIOSes, like my Asus ROG, do not support the "Pop-Up
> Boot Menu" if you disable the stupid boot logo. That's right, I can
> press F8 for the boot menu ONLY if I DO NOT enable the good'ol text mode
> BIOS boot screen. Kinda annoying...
>
> Regards,
>

Did you check the release notes of any later BIOS,
to see if that got fixed ? That rates an "Ouch"
in terms of convenience. I use popup boot all the time.

Paul

[Paul]

It appears it doesn't have Popup Boot. To quote here
(for a similar board)...

https://forums.anandtech.com/threads/abit-ip35e-quick-boot-menu-key.2117743/

"You have to press Del., and choose the boot in the BIOS.

In its time, it was a combination of a great Mobo with few stupid quirks"

So somehow they missed that.

All I have here for reference, is an ip35-Pro manual.

https://s10.postimg.org/blij1vsc9/IP35_PRO.gif

Check the USB setup, as it has a section for USB Storage,
and I suspect you can place a USB item in the boot order,
if it uses hard disk emulation. It's just not documented
well enough to say more. However, kudos to them for
doing such a good job in the manual. Many boards wouldn't
give this level of detail.

Save the above animated GIF. You may be able to open it in
GIMP, and use the Layer dialog (in Dockable Dialogs) to
select which layer is currently on view. I purposely
set the animation time constant short, so if you hit
Preview in Windows by accident, it doesn't take too
long to play. An image editor, maybe even irfanview,
might allow looking at individual frames.

Paul

[John B. Smith]

On Fri, 16 Sep 2016 23:42:13 -0400, Paul <nos...@needed.invalid>
wrote:

Yes, the manual is fairly complete. Being a first-time PC builder I
spent an inordinate amount of time selecting a board (and every other
part) and haunted this newsgroup diligently to choose my motherboard.
I got lucky and the damned thing worked when I turned it on! Abit also
had a wonderful forum I could haunt to pick brains.

And then 6 months later Abit went out of the motherboard business! I
also always stand in the wrong line at the bank and grocery store too.

The manual does lead you to believe that a usb device might be
insertable in the boot order per page 2-19 (yeah I still have my mb
manual). But I don't believe it is possible, haven't went back in and
tried yet. I did wrestle a long time with your gif before I finally
found "Extract all frames" in IrfanView. Once knowing that, it is a
very slick way to send a manual to a newsgroup! (now if I just knew
something about creating gifs, I've tried a few but for amusement and
it took hours) Photoshop didn't work, making a movie out of the gif
didn't work. It was a good project for me though the answer was
eventually right where you suggested.

Thinking about ImgBurn to plunk Kaspersky onto the key. I suppose
Kaspersky wouldn't have went to the trouble of giving me a
rescue2usb.exe if that would work.

[Mike Easter]

John B. Smith wrote:
> Thinking about ImgBurn to plunk Kaspersky onto the key. I suppose
> Kaspersky wouldn't have went to the trouble of giving me a
> rescue2usb.exe if that would work.

I used Rufus to write Kaspersky to USB successfully.

https://rufus.akeo.ie/ Create bootable USB drives the easy way

I like Rufus best of all of the USB writers, Windows or Linux, so I
usually write USB with Windows.

--
Mike Easter

[John B. Smith]

On Sat, 17 Sep 2016 11:13:59 -0400, John B. Smith <cra...@verizon.net>

Went back into my BIOS to further investigate the USB possibilities.
Found Integrated Periperals - On chip PCI Device - USB Device Settings
and THERE WAS MY KINGSTON DATA TRAVELER! I'd never seen it visible
from BIOS before. The settings for it were Auto, FDD, HDD. Auto is
default and sounded reasonable, but that hadn't worked. So set it to
HDD, booted and hoped. No help. Scrounged around another 20 minutes
and suddenly discovered that setting it to HDD had MADE IT VISIBLE IN
MY LIST OF HARD DRIVES!. All I had to do was bump it up to the head of
the hard drive list and it booted successfully and ran Kaspersky for
me. Thanks Paul. And thanks Mike for the alternate way of making
flashdrives with Rufus, I'll look into it.
I doubt I'll ever have that helpful popup menu though but I've been
working without it for years.

[Paul]

Yes, that's the "Old School" way :-)

Paul