This is my second post here, didn't see an intro forum so hello everyone. This forum seems like one of the most technical I've found for PC related information. It seems the internet just keeps getting noisier and good info keeps getting harder to find. This site may alleviate that situation to some extent. So I've been wanting to consolidate all my bootable utilities onto one flash drive. From Googling around it seems that YUMI is the go-to utility for that. It does work well, but it gave me trouble with the Windows Repair disk. Booting the repair disk from an ISO was confusing Windows Repair into thinking there's a boot problem when there isn't. For some reason it seemed to be looking at the flash drive as the boot drive instead of the actual root drive. So that kind of put a spanner in the works for me in building an all-in-one bootable flash. I had seen EasyBCD mentioned a lot and thought it was only a tool for editing the BCD file Windows uses for its boot manager. I've found it's a lot more than that. It can load a version of Grub on the flash drive to boot ISOs as well as wim files. I had a little trouble with the program at first, confused me initially with the way it works. I think there's room for improvement with the interface. Though once I got a handle on it I was able to boot the Windows Repair disk normally from the Windows boot loader as well as several other bootable ISOs I have. All works without issue. I was really happy to find EasyBCD can do this so I wanted to post about it. It's a great utility and does things I've not seen anything else able to do. It's only the difference between one or several flash drives and they're cheap, but it's just super handy to have everything on one drive. So thanks EasyBCD for a really cool product.
There is NOTHING EasyBCD does that can not be done with bcdedit/bcdboot etc And they also distribute MS files (which legally is not allowed)
Yepp, absolutely useful SW to get rid of the ugly and pointlessly complicated bcdedit syntax. Don't foreget his companion iReboot which is really useful to reboot the system once with a different OS, w/o having to touch the default boot sequence.
And there is absolutely nothing that windows can do that isn't doable using manually the right sequence of 0s and 1s, but maybe windows is a little more handy... Downloading a couple of exe that you have already inside your installation anyway doesn't seem such crime to me.
Well the main thing is the app does what I need quickly and easily. The command line syntax of bcdedit is rather convoluted. I looked at that link for bootice and it was all in Chinese so it may be a better product, but doesn't help me if it's not in my language. I don't know that bcdboot can handle bootable ISOs, as far as I understand it only handles wim files. I suppose I could convert the ISOs I have to wim, but that's a lot of trouble only to use a sparse command line utility. As far as distributing Microsoft boot files, that's kind of a gray area I think. I suppose they could reverse engineer that stuff and write their own, but why.