54 replies to this topic

[sambul61]

Your 1-st link explains how to add (i.e. chainload) Burg option to BCD Boot Menu (where BCD is standard Windows bootloader) and add required Burg files to the system drive Root. Default MBR is not replaced, only boot.ini is amended by Burg boot option, so you can easily try it with your main HD or USB, if its main bootloader is BCD.

Your 2-nd link above explains how to add Burg option to Grub4DOS boot menu, if you installed Grub4DOS to your Thumb's MBR instead of Windows BCD. Assuming you installed Windows as primary OS onto your Thumb, just extract from the Burg Windows installer and add Burg folder to Root, then add Burg menu section to Grub4DOS menu.lst as shown.

The 3-d link offers ready to go current Burg Windows installer. I didn't try it, but it may indeed replace your current MBR with Burg's and also add Burg folder to Root. In that scenario you better be fluent with editing Burg config file, where you can add all required Windows and ISO boot sections. You may want to dig into Burg forum to clarify, what Burg installer exactly does.

All this multiboot drama is a challenging exercise for an inquisitive mind. At the end you'll start seen, how much you can actually accomplish with the right boot tools. And also feel more comfortable with various PC service tools. It pays off in real life one way or another to learn this.

[tummychow]

I tried opening up the BURG installer executable, and it doesn't seem to have much in the way of drive selection before jumping straight into the installation. I'd rather not brick my main hard drive so I'm not going to try this, but I'll ask around on the burg forums.
As for the second link, I took a closer look (which I probably should have done first =P). It seems that most of the parts you need are in the bucfg file, which is available in that zip. However, buldr and buldr.mbr seem to be unavailable, and I suspect you'd have to compile them yourself. Is there a precompiled version?

EDIT: Whoa hey, never mind that. On the end of this page http://www.burgloade...php?topic=101.0 I found the buldr stuff. I'll give this a shot and see what happens.

EDIT: Okay, so now that I think I know how to install BURG, how do I configure it? Does it use the same menu.lst system as grub4dos? I tried booting into burg and huzzah it works in QEMU, but all it has is the command line shell. Is there a configuration file for boot options or a menu? I understand there's a theme engine of some kind; is this just for building graphical menus or is it the only way to make a menu?

Edited by tummychow, 13 January 2011 - 02:28 AM.

[sambul61]

Good progress. I doubt there is a good tutorial on preparing Burg.cfg file similar to Diddy's Grub4DOS Guide, since not many ppl around here managed to dig into Burg so far. You'll have to dig for it, keeping in mind that Burg.cfg would use a combo of Grub2 and Grub4DOS commands, hence may feel like a combo of Grub.cfg and Menu.lst.

Grub4DOS is supplied with a sample of menu.lst, and there are plenty of other menu.lst examples around here. Some hints about compiling Grub2 cfg file can be drawn from Ubuntu Grub2 page. And you know where to look for Burg.cfg info. Enjoy...

Next interesting step would be trying to chainload Vboot from Burg, then backup your PC Windows install (if any) to a large VHD file, and boot it with Vboot (it can read large files to RAM by portions). That may be handy on the road as a Thumb kept VHD copy of your PC system drive with all its daily soft bootable on any PC. You may face some Windows generalization and locked BIOS issues with this approach though when booting it on a public PC, but it worse to try as a part of your multiboot Thumb challenge.

[tummychow]

What mainly worries me about figuring out Burg.cfg is that I don't know if it's precompiled into the burg loader, or if it's a file accessed on disk like Menu.lst.
Docs on GRUB2 suggest that no configuration file even exists for GRUB2; instead a list of kernels bootable is generated at boot time. Grub.cfg is not supposed to be edited by users (it is changed every time GRUB2 is updated). (I think that this is because, due to the loopback feature available in GRUB2, developers are expected to provide their own compatible GRUB2 boot options with the livecd, as you told me for sysrescd. As a result, no overarching menu system is meant to be created by the user.) There instead appears to be a directory for side instructions, etc/grub.d, that is injected into the grub.cfg file.
This page http://code.google.c...rationVariables seems to be similar in nature to this https://help.ubuntu....ault/grub (file). The thing is that most of these things seem to refer to installing BURG in linux; unfortunately I am working on Windows 7. I will have to keep looking...

[sambul61]

Why don't you try adding Burg to your system hard drive's BCD Boot Menu using this method, and then try to edit burg.cfg to your liking with Notepad++ and see, how it affects Burg's boot image abilities? No harm will be done to Windows, yet you can always restore your Windows MBR if required with tools like EasyBCD or Win Recovery Disk, or following these suggestions. Or make a VHD from your Win drive and play with it & install Burg to it in a Virtual Machine. For one thing its a lot faster than experimenting with a USB Thumb. And if you already found your thumb to be pretty slow for such tests, you may want to look at What Bootable USB Flash Drive Would You Recommend only to find that a 2.5" SATA laptop drive in an external USB & SATA combo enclosure is the best choice for the multiboot task challenge.