116 - Add Hirens 9.5 to your grub4dos USB Multiboot drive

Older versions of Hirens BootCD are based on DOS (versions up to 9.6). These are difficult to add to a multiboot USB drive, especially if the drive is NTFS formatted or you have multiple HBCDs that you want to add..

Follow these instructions to make a working disk image of Hirens 9.5 which you can then boot using grub4dos.

Note: The best way to add Hirens ISOs to an Easy2Boot USB drive is to make a .FAT32 imgPTN file from the ISO using MakePartImage.

The Tutorial is based on an original article I found here.

Requirements

1. The Hirens 9.5 ISO (you can Google for this and download it)

2. 7Zip or some other utility to extract files from the ISO

3. Extract_Boot_FIles.zip

4. DOS IO.SYS and COMMAND.COM files (these can be downloaded from the offsite source here)

5. A spare USB Flash drive that you can erase (128MB or larger)

Method

1. Run RMPrepUSB - insert your spare USB flash drive and change the settings as shown in the screenshot below:

Size=120, MS-DOS, FAT16

Click '6 Prepare Drive' to erase and re-format the USB drive.

Note that the '1 Partition Size' should be set to 120MB because we are going to create an image of the USB drive later on.

(optiona) If you want to use a non-English language, download the patch file from here and extract it to the same folder as the Hirens ISO file. Then run Patch.bat and choose your language. Once it has finished, you only need the new .ISO file.

2. Extract the BootCD folder from the Hirens 9.5 ISO file and copy the folder to your USB drive:

H:\BootCD (folder)

3. Download the 'Extract_Boot_Files.zip' file and extract the contents to any folder on your Windows hard disk, e.g. C:\temp

C:\temp\Get_Boot_Files.cmd

C:\temp\Tools (folder)

4. Drag-and-Drop the Hirens 9.5 .ISO file onto the Get_Boot_Files.cmd file. This should create a new folder which is the same name as the ISO file. This folder will contain the DOS boot files used when the ISO boots to DOS.

C:\temp\Get_Boot_Files.cmd

C:\temp\Tools (folder)

C:\temp\Hiren'sBootCD.9.5 (folder)

C:\temp\Hiren'sBootCD.9.5.bin (floppy disk image extracted from the ISO file)

5. Copy all the files from the C:\temp\Hiren'sBootCD.9.5 folder to the root of the USB drive. The USB drive should now look like this:

6. Download the DOS IO.SYS and COMMAND.COM files (can be downloaded from here), extract the two files and overwrite the same two files in the root of the USB drive

7. The USB drive should now be bootable and run Hirens. Test it using RMPrepUSB - Run QEMU button or test on a real system.

8. At this point, you could simply copy the entire contents of your USB drive to your multiboot grub4dos USB drive and use a menu.lst entry of:

title Run HBCD9.5

chainloader /IO.SYS

However, this will not run from an NTFS USB drive and it will leave lots of DOS files all over the root of your multiboot drive. To fix this, we can make an image - proceed as follows:

9. Click on RMPrepUSB - Drive->File, use a filename of HBCD95.imgHD, a start of 0, a length of 'P1', and a file start position of 0. This will make a 120MB .imgHD file from the USB drive.

10. Copy the HBCD95.imgHD file and use the menu below:

title HBCD9.5

errorcheck off

map (hd0) (hd1)

map (hd1) (hd0)

errorcheck on

map --heads=0 --sectors-per-track=0 /_ISO/MAINMENU/HBCD95.imgHD (hd0) || map --mem --heads=0 --sectors-per-track=0 /_ISO/MAINMENU/HBCD95.imgHD (hd0)

map --hook

rootnoverify (hd0,0)

chainloader /IO.SYS

Most HBCD DOS programs should now work. One that doesn't seem to work is the Hard Disk Tools - HDD Regenerator program which complains about Drive A: and exits. Most of the others seems to work OK.