A Multiboot USB Drive with Windows 7, Ubuntu, UBCD4Win, Drive Tools, etc. - Second Cut

I had previously worked through the steps to create a bootable USB drive.  I had intended to create just a simple alternative to booting the basicWindows 7 system recovery tools from a CD, but it turned out to be easier to make a more powerful and flexible multiboot USB drive.  Now I had a larger (16GB) USB drive, and more stuff to put on it.  This post contains what I hoped would be a simpler and more comprehensive description of the process of setting up that kind of multiboot device.

USB Drive Setup

I started with YUMI and a bunch of ISOs, either downloaded or created with ImgBurn (see the previous post).  For now, the ISOs I wanted to install were the full Windows 7 DVD, the Windows 7 System Recovery CD, the full Windows XP SP3 CD, Ubuntu 10.10 and 12.04, Knoppix, Acronis True Image Home (ATIH) 11 and also ATIH 2011 with Universal Restore, Ultimate Boot CD (UBCD) and UBCD4Win, Balder FreeDOS, Hiren's Boot CD, BartPE, U.S. DOD LPS, Super Grub Disk, Super Grub2 Disk, MHDD, Microsoft Windows Memory Diagnostic, Memtest86+, Balder FreeDOS, Darik's Boot & Nuke (DBAN), Clonezilla, GParted, Partition Wizard, Parted Magic and diagnostic CDs for Samsung, Hitachi, Western Digital, and Seagate hard drives.  Some of these, I knew, were redundant.  I figured I would work out the details later; I was just curious to see how much would fit, and what would work, in the multiboot approach.

Some of those ISOs were already listed as distributions in YUMI.  That was true for Balder FreeDOS, Clonezilla, DBAN, GParted, Hiren's Boot CD, Knoppix, Memtest86+, Parted Magic, Partition Wizard, both flavors of Ubuntu, UBCD, and the Windows 7 installer.  For the others, there was an option at the bottom of the YUMI menu:  Try an Unlisted ISO.  Except for that last choice, using the option to install a recognized ISO would remove that ISO from the list, apparently to help people keep track of what had already been installed.

The ISOs that I had created from CDs, using ImgBurn, were not necessarily named properly. YUMI didn't recognize some of them until I renamed them to match the hint provided in YUMI. For instance, YUMI wanted the downloaded (still zipped, yet renamed to remove the ISO pre-extension) version of Memtest86+.

The installation process got interrupted partway through: I had to pull out the USB drive to use the jack for something else, and wound up killing YUMI and starting again. Neither Windows Explorer nor Windows Disk Management were able to see the drive at all when I reinserted it. This may have been due to not removing the USB drive properly.  I had to plug it into another computer, eject it from that computer, plug it back into the machine running YUMI, and kill and restart YUMI again, to get YUMI to see it again. At about the same time, I also noticed that YUMI would no longer make a program or other ISO (e.g., Ubuntu 12.04) available on its list, once that program was installed on the multiboot USB drive.  Also, YUMI now seemed not to be making any new files or folders on the USB drive, even though it was reporting that the various processes were completing successfully.  The ejecting and reinserting process also apparently fixed these problems:  now, as before, the programs already installed on the USB drive were no longer listed in YUMI, and I could see new things being added to the USB drive.

Windows Explorer seemed to tell me that the installation process was somewhat irregular, presumably due to the divergent demands of these various programs.  Many got their own subfolders, under the "multiboot" folder on the USB drive.  Hiren's Boot CD got its own folder on a higher level; UBCD was represented by just an ISO file in an "ISOS" folder on the USB drive; Balder FreeDOS seemed to have been installed as nothing more than a single file in the multiboot folder.

As noted above, I had to use the "Try an Unlisted ISO" option for a number of the programs listed above.  I used this, first, with the full Windows 7 DVD.  I decided to take this route, after first using the canned "Windows 7 installer" option because, as noted above, I was hoping to install several flavors of Windows.  When I used the canned installer option, the process took only a few seconds, suggesting that perhaps that option was just copying over the information needed for a system recovery approach.  But when I used the custom "Try an Unlisted ISO" option, YUMI indicated that it was copying 3 GB of material, and took several minutes to do it.

After installing Windows 7 on the multiboot USB drive, I used the Unlisted ISO option for the Windows System Repair CD.  That took only a few seconds.  The USB drive's ISOS folder now contained entries for both of those ISOs.  Same thing when I added Windows XP.  I proceeded likewise for the other unlisted programs noted above:  two flavors of Acronis, BartPE, MHDD, Microsoft Windows Memory Diagnostic, two varieties of Super Grub Disk, UBCD4Win, U.S. DOD LPS, and four hard drive diagnostic CDs.

I made some additional observations during these processes.  One was that the ISOs seemed to be copied verbatim into the ISOS folder.  It was possible that long filenames, or filenames containing spaces or odd characters, could cause problems for some programs.  In other words, looking ahead, I wondered whether it would have been to my advantage to rename some ISOs, at least temporarily, to something simpler.  During each installation, YUMI would report information of the following nature:

Creating Label MULTIBOOT on F:
Good Syslinux Exists...
A Previous Multiboot Installation was detected...proceeding to add your new selectio...
Copy to F:\multiboot\ISOS\Super Grub Disk.iso
Try an Unlisted ISO and its menu entry were added!
All Finished, Process is Complete!

Most of these processes took only a few seconds.  After all, these ISOs were mostly very small, containing just a utility program.  Instead of using the "Try an Unlisted ISO" option, I probably could have configured many of them as "Try an Unlisted ISO (Run from RAM)."  When I had finally worked through the foregoing list of programs to install and indicated that I was done, YUMI said,

YUMI has completed the installation.

Your Selections have been Installed on your USB drive.

Feel Free to run this tool again to Install more Distros.

YUMI will keep track of selections you have already Installed.

Windows Explorer > Properties indicated that the 16GB USB drive was now about 60% full (around 8.5GB used, out of 14.9GB actually available).  I exited YUMI, ejected the USB drive, put it into my laptop, and booted it.

Using the Multiboot USB Drive

When I booted the laptop with the USB flash drive (hitting Esc at the appropriate time to see the option of booting from that drive), I got the YUMI Multiboot USB screen.  It presented four options:  Linux Distributions, System Tools, Other Operating Systems and Tools, and Directly Bootable ISOs.  Under Linux Distributions, it showed me the two Ubuntus (10.10 and 12.04) and Knoppix.  So that part of the installation seemed to have worked.  Under System Tools, it showed me Clonezilla, DBAN, GParted, Parted Magic, Partition Wizard, Balder DOS image (FreeDOS), and Ultimate Boot CD (UBCD).  It had nothing under Other Operating Systems and Tools.  Finally, when I chose Directly Bootable ISOs, it said, "Launching GRUB," and then it showed me quite a list:  Windows 7, the Windows 7 Repair CD, Windows XP, two flavors of Acronis, BartPE, MHDD, four HDD diagnostics options (Hitachi, Samsung, Seagate, and Western Digital), Windows Memory Diagnostic, two flavors of Super Grub Disk, UBCD4Windows, and US DOD LPS.  Collectively, these items accounted for everything on my original list except Hiren's Boot CD and Memtest86+.  I wasn't sure how those had slipped through the cracks.

I decided I wouldn't be able to run all of these programs at this point.  But I did want to try a few.  I started off with the full Windows 7 CD.  It worked.  I was able to go into its repair options and run CHKDSK on an external USB hard drive.  (I had to skip past some dialogs in which Windows expressed its interest in repairing my system.  I was not surprised that it was confused by what it found, and there seemed to be a good chance that it would make a mess of everything as a result, if I let it go ahead.)

After running CHKDSK on that external drive, I exited Windows 7 via its Restart option.  That put me back at the point of hitting Esc and seeing the YUMI Multiboot screen again.  This time, I tried Ubuntu 12.04.  I was able to use its copy of GParted to scan the laptop's internal and external hard drive.  GParted found problems with the laptop's C partition, so I retarted from within Ubuntu -- which, again, restarted the computer hardware rather than putting me back at the YUMI Multiboot screen, as might have happened in a virtual setup.  This time, I chose the Windows 7 System Repair CD, rather than the full Windows 7 DVD, and I was able to use that to run CHKDSK.

Next, I wanted to defragment the laptop's internal and external hard drives.  Of course, I could do that from within Windows after a normal boot, but it occurred to me that I didn't actually know, or recall, whether there were any defrag tools that could run from a non-Windows boot -- and, if there were such tools, I didn't know whether they would be included in any of the ISOs that I had installed on the Multiboot USB drive.  One thread indicated that Ubuntu, itself, did not have an NTFS-compatible defragger that would be advisable for use on an NTFS partition, especially on drive C, with the possible exception of ntfsfix.  So I looked instead at UBCD.  It seemed to be working -- its System Speed Test ran, producing a processor benchmark and other information -- but it did not seem to have anything for defragging, and it exited awkwardly, requiring a Ctrl-Alt-Del reboot.

BartPE appeared to have plugins that would defrag, so I tried that.  BartPE began to load, but then gave me a BSOD, requiring a hard reset.  That problem recurred on the second try.  BartPE did not seem to work, at least for purposes of this particular laptop.  It gave me a BSOD with STOP error code 7B.  As I watched it start to load, I was reminded that it used Windows XP, so I tried the Windows XP SP3 option from the Multiboot USB drive.  That gave me an Error 27 ("unrecognized command") in response to this command, apparently contained in the Multiboot CD:

find --set-root --ignore-floppies --ignore-cd /multiboot/ISOS/Windows XP SP3 Slipstreamed.iso

I was not able to determine whether the laptop would have accepted a CD in place of the USB drive, for purposes of booting WinXP, because I had no internal or external CD drive to try it with.  I could have tried a single-purpose USB drive containing only Windows XP, but at this moment I had insufficient time and interest to play with that.  My operating conclusion for the moment was that WinXP (therefore BartPE) did not work with this Multiboot USB drive on this machine.

Moving on, I looked to see if UBCD4Windows might have a defragger.  I noticed, in passing, that UBCD4Win contained a copy of DBAN (as did, I think, UBCD), so (if it worked) apparently I did not need to put a separate DBAN install on the USB drive.  UBCD4Win also had FreeDOS.  These options were available from its initial menu, and it appeared that I could add more.  I went into its menu option that would load UBCD4Win per se; I noticed, once again, that it relied on WinXP; and once again I got a BSOD.   As with BartPE, the STOP code was 7B.  A quick look at one troubleshooting guide seemed to indicate that WinXP and these other programs that used it (i.e., BartPE and UBCD4Win) might be failing to load updated drivers for the hard drive controller.  Another thread suggested going into the laptop's BIOS during bootup (F2 on my machine; DEL on some others) and changing the SATA setting from AHCI to Compatibility Mode.  I didn't seem to have exactly that option.  I did have one that was set as IDE->AHCI; I tried changing that to Native IDE.  It occurred to me, as I was doing that, that possibly I wouldn't be having this problem if I weren't trying to boot with the external USB hard drive connected; I had noticed that doing so tended to stall bootup on one of my desktop computers too.  Anyway, the AHCI change didn't help, and neither did booting with the external USB hard drive disconnected.  End of troubleshooting attempt.

I hadn't thought to verify whether the Windows 7 System Repair CD had a defragger.  I tried that now.  "DIR /S DEFRAG*.*" led to C:\Windows\System32\defrag.exe.  I tried it as "DEFRAG /C /H /M /U /X," but that didn't work.  It worked without the /M.  Apparently there was no "background" in the system repair mode.  (For details, type "DEFRAG /?")  So, OK, I did have an NTFS defragger on the Multiboot USB drive after all.  Only later would it occur to me that, by using the /C option, I might be asking the program to defrag the USB drive as well.  That concern faded, however, as the defragmentation went on . . . and on . . . and on.  Granted, defragmenting a fragmented 2TB drive can take a while.  And it did.  It took days.  I was not sure whether a Windows-based defragger would have taken just as long.  I had observed some pretty leisurely defragging operations from time to time.  But this was really a slow boat to China.

When the defragging was done, I decided to try running hard drive diagnostics.  The external USB hard drive was a Samsung.  When I tried to run the Samsung diagnostics that I had added to the Multiboot USB drive, however, I got the same "find --set-root" error as quoted above, except in this case it was referring to the Samsung HDD Diagnostics ISO, not the Windows XP ISO.  Basically, though, by this point it seemed that a lot of problems would be solved if they, or I, or someone could work through all the steps needed to make a Windows XP CD work on this USB drive.

And that's where I left it for now.  I had much of what I needed for the laptop on this one USB drive.  Until they improved Yumi and/or until I was able to troubleshoot the problems, I could perhaps get other ISOs to run from single-purpose USB flash drives apart from this multiboot one.  Despite the imperfections, these little devices had come a long way.

Creating a Bootable Windows 7 USB Drive for Installation / System Repair / Recovery - First Cut

Normally, if I booted a computer from a Windows 7 installation DVD, I could get into System Recovery Options (e.g., Startup Repair, System Restore, Command Prompt) that would let me run various diagnostics.  Unfortunately, my laptop did not have a CD/DVD drive.  So if I wanted to see those Windows 7 startup repair options, it seemed that I would have to find a way to do so by booting the computer from a USB flash drive instead.  This post describes the steps I took to develop a USB drive that would give me those options.  It also incidentally describes how to make a bootable copy of the Windows 7 installation DVD on a USB drive.

One approach was to put the entire Windows 7 installation DVD on a USB drive.  The DVD contained about 3GB of material, so this would require a USB drive of 4GB or larger.  Another approach was to put just a Windows 7 System Repair or Recovery CD on a USB drive.  This would require only about 150MB, so I could use a smaller, older, cheaper, or otherwise unused USB flash drive.  The Recovery CD option might load faster than a full Windows CD, but it would not be useful for installation or for recovering system files.

Either way, the first step was to get the necessary files.  The Windows installation files would traditionally be purchased on a DVD, but it was also possible to download them.  Similarly, the Windows 7 System Repair Disc was ordinarily a CD, but it could be copied or converted to files on a hard drive.

To get a System Repair Disc, I had to search my computer for "system repair disc."  That didn't work in my case -- I must have renamed the relevant shortcut -- so I searched for various combinations of "create," "system," "repair," and "recovery."  I could also have used Control Panel > Backup and Restore > Create a system repair disc.  The option of downloading the file(s) needed for a system repair CD was apparently disappearing.  In any case, eventually I found and used the link to a little Windows 7 program whose title bar read simply, "Create a system repair disc."  This created the recovery CD.

Next, the files that weren't already in ISO format needed to be converted to ISO.  The downloaded versions of Windows 7 evidently came in ISO format.  By contrast, the installation DVD and the recovery CD were not in ISO format.  To convert them to ISO, I started by using Magic ISO Maker.  It warned me that it would not create an ISO larger than 300MB, but this seemed to be a bluff to motivate an immediate purchase.  Format Factory would apparently have been one among many freeware alternatives.  When I remembered that ImgBurn would create ISOs from files or discs, however, I deleted the Magic ISO output and used ImgBurn instead, since it had worked well for me in other sorts of projects in the past.

Once I had an ISO, I had a choice between two different approaches to get it properly unpacked and operational on the USB drive.  A dedicated USB drive would focus solely on one version of Windows 7 (e.g., 32-bit vs. 64-bit, Home vs. Ultimate).  This dedicated approach seemed likely to be relatively simple and reliable, and would probably be all that most users would need.  By contrast, a multiboot USB drive would allow the user to install and/or run two or more different operating systems (potentially including e.g., Windows XP and Linux).  I decided to go with the dedicated, single-system approach.

I started with the Windows 7 system recovery CD, which ImgBurn had now converted to a file I called Win7SysRepair.iso.  There seemed to be several ways to put this ISO onto a bootable USB drive.  One approach involved using Grub4DOS.  Another was to use Microsoft's Windows 7 USB/DVD Download Tool.  I ran that Tool.  It called for a few simple steps.  First, I plugged in the little 512MB USB flash drive on which I was going to install the Windows 7 system recovery CD files.  Then I pointed the Download Tool toward the newly created Win7SysRepair.iso.  I clicked the USB Device button, and the Tool found the USB drive.  I clicked Begin Copying and confirmed that it was OK to erase the USB drive.  The tool said, "Creating bootable USB device."  The first time I tried it, it failed, with this error message:

We were unable to copy your files.  Please check your USB device and the selected ISO file and try again.

I assumed this was due to interference from AntiRun, which I was using to keep an eye on USB drives.  I shut down AntiRun and tried again.  But no, the Tool failed the second time too.  To troubleshoot this problem, I ran a search and saw that this was a rare error.

The problem seemed to be that the Tool was formatting the USB drive as NTFS.  I thought the solution would be to go to Start > Run > diskmgmt.msc and quick-reformat the USB drive with a FAT32 file system (using a volume label of no more than eight characters).  But I still got the same error.  Another source said the problem was that the Microsoft programs (diskmgmt.msc and also the Tool) failed to use the Clean command.  In other words, my USB stick had residual formatting from some previous use.

The advice was to fix this problem by opening a command window with Administrator rights and type "diskpart" at the prompt.  This started the DiskPart program, with its own DISKPART> prompt.  The next step was to type "list disk" to see what drives were connected to the computer.  This showed me that, as expected, the last disk was the smallest:  491MB.  That was surely my USB drive.  (It seemed pretty important not to be reformatting the wrong drive.)  That 491MB drive was Disk 2.  So I typed "select disk 2."  It informed me that Disk 2 was now selected.  I typed "list disk" again to check and, sure enough, there was an asterisk next to Disk 2.  So I was ready to type "clean."  It said, "DiskPart succeeded in cleaning the disk."  With that done, I could type these remaining commands in DiskPart, one at a time:

create partition primary
select partition 1
active
format quick fs=fat32
assign
exit

I exited the command window and tried Microsoft's Windows 7 USB/DVD Download Tool again.  It still failed.  I tried again, this time using a different USB drive.  This time was even worse:  previously, it had failed at the 99% mark, but with this drive the copying process didn't even start.  I tried using an ISO built from a System Recovery CD created on another computer, running a different version of Windows.  But the Windows Download Tool said this:

Invalid ISO File

The selected file is not a valid ISO file.  Please select a valid ISO file and try again.

I got that error twice, with ISOs created by ImgBurn and also by Magic ISO Maker.  It was time to give up on the Microsoft Download Tool, reformat the USB drive, and try another approach.

I went back to look at the Grub4DOS approach mentioned above.  I wouldn't be using it to install multiple bootable operating systems on my little 512MB USB flash drive, but it looked like a straightforward process anyway; I figured maybe the education would come in handy later.  For this approach, I needed to download and install MultibootISO.  I found what appeared to be a popular, current version of this program on a Pendrivelinux webpage.

On closer inspection, what we downloading was now called YUMI (short for Your Universal Multiboot Installer).  YUMI was apparently a successor to both MultibootISO and Universal USB Installer.  YUMI was portable; no installation required.  YUMI didn't have a built-in option for installing Windows 7.  I got the feeling that YUMI was not going to replace MultibootISO for this particular task.  Nonetheless, I tried.  In YUMI, I selected "Try an Unlisted ISO."  YUMI didn't complain that the ISO was invalid.  It seemed to think it had succeeded.  Sadly, the USB drive wasn't bootable, at least not in the laptop where I tried it.  I tried again and, whoa, success!  Apparently I had just not hit Esc quickly enough to bring up my laptop's bootable USB drive menu when the laptop was first starting up, or maybe I had hit Esc too many times and escaped my way right out of that menu.  But now, on this second go, YUMI gave me the Windows 7 recovery CD functionality, running from my USB drive.

Well.  This YUMI thing was pretty cool.  When I started this post, I thought I would just be content with the Windows 7 installation DVD. For that purpose, my spare 4GB USB flash drive was sufficient.  But now I wanted to try YUMI with a large USB drive that would accommodate the Windows 7 installation DVD as well as other operating systems and other bootable CDs.  But this would have to await purchase of a 16GB or larger USB flash drive.

A Backup Arrangement with Beyond Compare

I had been using Beyond Compare (BC) for a year or two.  Over that period, I had settled into what seemed like a decent backup arrangement.  This post describes that arrangement.

For a while, I had a spare internal partition to which I would make backups.  The original concept there was that I would use rsync or some other program to make backups on an hourly basis.  That setup had fallen into disrepair, mostly because I didn't quite like how it was working.  So I didn't have an hourly backup at this point.  The arrangement described here is more on the longer-term (e.g., daily, weekly, monthly) level.

My backup took place on external drives.  I had an external enclosure that I would have to open up (removing several screws) to swap drives, and I also had an inexpensive dock that I could just plug an internal SATA drive into.  Both seemed to work equally well.  The enclosure was handy for unplugging the drive and taking it with me.  Now and then -- especially when the tornado alarms sounded -- I visualized myself grabbing it and running for the basement.  I wondered if that would be one of those fateful delays that would cost me my life.

The external enclosure had an eSATA connector, but my previous motherboard had not been able to accommodate eSATA on a hot-swappable basis.  In other words, I had to reboot in order to get the system to recognize it.  It also had a USB connector.  The external dock (i.e., not the enclosure) was also a USB device.  USB was slower but very adaptable.  That was almost always what I used.  Some partitions on the external drive were compressed, to save space.  I had the impression that this did not help with the USB connection -- that the CPU would unpack the file before shipping it across the slow USB cable to the computer, resulting in at least as much data moving along the wire -- but I hadn't verified that.

For my purposes, Beyond Compare offered two key concepts.  First was the workspace.  If I plugged in the external drive that I used for daily backups, then I would open up the DAILY workspace in BC.  If I plugged in a drive that I used for weekly backups, then I would choose the WEEKLY workspace.  I also had a SIMPLE COMPARE workspace that I would use for random tasks -- say, comparing two folders on a one-shot basis.  And I had a NETBOOK workspace that I would use to synchronize my laptop.  GoodSync might have been better for that if I had been using the laptop frequently, but at this point it was mostly a case of keeping the data on the laptop current with the desktop.  That is, I was mostly doing one-way updates, from desktop to laptop.

My workspaces differed in the tabs they made available.  In the DAILY workspace, I had a tab for each day of the week, plus whatever other comparisons I would want BC to make on a daily basis.  Likewise for the WEEKLY and the other workspaces.  In other words, I used a workspace as a place where I would be able to see tabs for each comparison that I wanted BC to make, whenever I plugged in the weekly drive or the laptop or whatever.

I found that the best approach was to start BC first, let the workspace load, and only then turn on or connect the external USB drive.  That way, BC would not try to do complete comparisons for all of the open tabs.  It would do its calculations for the relevant folders on the drives inside the computer, which were already available to it, but on the external drive it would have to wait until I gave it the go-ahead within a particular tab.

Focusing on the DAILY workspace, I was writing these notes on a Friday.  So to guide my remarks, I opened BC at this point.  Somehow, I had arranged for the DAILY workspace to come up by default; or maybe BC just defaulted to the last open workspace.  I wasn't sure how I had arranged that.  When BC was up and running, I turned on the USB drive.  It took that drive a moment to become available.  (I found that AntiRun was useful, not only for protecting my system from autorun malware and such, but also for telling me when a drive really was online or offline, and for giving me a functional way of taking external drives offline.)

I went to the Friday tab.  BC had stalled because the Friday folder on the external drive had been unavailable.  I told it to retry; and now that the USB drive was connected, BC ran its comparison.  (Details on the kinds of comparisons available, and other program capabilities, are available at Beyond Compare's website.  Their forums and other tech support had been very responsive, the few times I had contacted them.)

I had modified my BC toolbar to present the red Mirror button.  This said, basically, just overwrite whatever is in the backup space (in this case, the Friday folder on the USB drive) with whatever is on drive D in the computer.  Drive D was the one that I backed up daily.  So in this case, a number of files had changed since the previous Friday.  Sometimes I would take a look at them; sometimes not.  Usually not.  It seemed pretty rare that a file would be accidentally deleted.  Daily examination of all changing files had seemed to be overkill.

When I say that I would take a look, I mean that BC showed me two panes, one for each of the folders being compared.  To keep things organized, the left-hand pane was almost always the authoritative one.  The left-hand pane would correspond, that is, to a partition inside the computer.  So I was looking at the right-hand pane, corresponding to the backup device.  If I saw a file listed in the right-hand pane, but not in the left-hand pane, that would mean that it was on the system when I made my backup a week ago, but now it was no longer on the system.  BC would also alert me, with a red font, if the file in the right-hand pane was newer.  Generally speaking, that wasn't supposed to happen.

I had an alternating weekly folder on this backup drive.  I used that one on Saturdays.  That's the one I examined more closely.  If I found that something was missing on Saturday, and I didn't think it should be missing, I could then click on the tabs for the other days of the week until I found the last backed-up version, and I could restore it from there.

Drive D contained the things that were in more active use.  I also had a separate partition, drive E, for things that took up a lot of space and didn't change very often.  Videos were the main example.  Because there were so few changes there, it was easier to look at the differences identified in BC, and verify that additions and deletions were desired.

In net terms, I liked this arrangement because it gave me some flexibility to combine automated and manual processes.  I wasn't vulnerable to one of those black-box backup solutions that would seem like they were working just fine until the moment of crisis, when I would painfully discover that I had failed to adjust some essential setting, or that the drive was malfunctioning, or whatever.

In this arrangement, if I was worried that files were missing, I could look down through lists of what was being added and deleted.  If I was confident that everything was fine, I could just click the Mirror button and the backup would happen.  I could also combine both approaches within a single tab, by telling BC to mirror only the selected folder(s).  This would gradually reduce the number of things remaining on the screen (assuming I had BC set, as usual, to Show Differences rather than Show All).  When confronted with what looked like a mess, I could thus eliminate the parts that seemed OK, and focus on the files and folders that didn't seem like they should have been getting added or deleted.

Like most other computer-related matters, my backup approach continued to evolve.  But as I say, I had been using BC for a while, at this point, and I was pretty much satisfied with the combination outlined here.

ASUS Eee PC: Booting from USB: Second Cut: Ubuntu

I had previously done a lot of flailing around, in an effort to boot an ASUS Eee PC from a USB thumb drive (a/k/a USB stick, pen drive, jump drive, flash drive).  It was time to try again.  This time, there seemed to be some easier and more promising avenues of attack.  This post describes this renewed effort, with a particular focus on booting Ubuntu 11.10.

First, the basics.  In the BIOS Setup Utility, I had set my BIOS to boot first from the USB drive.  I got into the BIOS setup by hitting F2 repeatedly while the the Eee was booting.  I already knew that F2 or Del tended to be the keys to hit, on various computers, if I wanted to go into BIOS setup.  But if I hadn't known that, it would have been wise to get into BIOS somehow and change a certain setting, so that instructions and information would come up onscreen while the computer was booting.  The setting to change for that purpose would logically have been in BIOS Setup > Boot > Boot Settings Configuration > Quiet Boot > Disabled.  But that was greyed out and already set to Disabled on my machine, and yet I wasn't getting those boottime instructions.  The answer was to go, instead, into BIOS Setup > Boot > Boot Booster > Disabled.

With that done, I was all set to reboot the Eee and see, onscreen, the information that I should hit F2 to run Setup.  If it went by too quickly, I could hit Pause (note that, on the Eee, Pause was actually Shift-Pause).  For some reason, I had to hit it twice to make it pause.  Maybe I had bad timing.

I wanted to go into the BIOS Setup, for purposes of booting with the USB stick, in order to tell the computer to boot, first, from the USB stick.  If I didn't do that, it would default to booting from the CD drive (nonexistent, in my Eee) or from the hard drive.  The place to make this change, in BIOS Setup, was at Boot > Boot Device Priority.  The item that needed to be first on the list was "Removable Dev."

Now I was ready to boot my bootable Ubuntu USB stick.  Problem:  I didn't yet have one.  For this, I needed a 4GB USB drive (possibly smaller but not, I think, any larger) with Ubuntu installed on it.  To install Ubuntu on the USB drive, I went to the Ubuntu download webpage, downloaded the Ubuntu 11.10 ISO, and followed their instructions to install it onto the USB drive.  Their instructions were just to download and run the Universal USB Installer from Pendrivelinux.com.  That installer was, itself, a portable program -- no installation needed.  When that installer was running, I needed to select Ubuntu Desktop Edition and follow the instructions.

So I had done that, and therefore I had Ubuntu on my jump drive.  And the Eee was seeing the jump drive when I booted it -- I could see a brief flash of recognition, onscreen, before the stupid thing went ahead and booted into Windows as usual.  This was probably about what I had managed to achieve last time I had tried this.

But, as I say, there were new suggestions and possibilities.  One was that I should have put Eeebuntu rather than Ubuntu Desktop onto that USB drive.  The idea was that Eeebuntu was designed to make it as easy as possible to get Ubuntu working well on an Eee.

To be precise about it, some of the players had changed.  By this point, according to Wikipedia, Eeebuntu had become Aurora.  And, for that matter, Ubuntu Eee (apparently not the same as Eeebuntu) had become Easy Peasy, and Ubuntu Netbook Edition had been merged into Ubuntu Desktop.  A Wikipedia comparison table suggested that there were multiple kinds of netbook-oriented versions of Ubuntu:  some were designed for netbooks generally, some for ASUS Eee netbooks, some for specific kinds of ASUS Eee netbooks, and some for other portable devices (e.g., smartphones).  It made sense to get one designed for an Eee, so at the moment it seemed that an Aurora download (either the promised Gnome edition or one of the original Eeebuntu versions) might provide the road to the future, if I did need to try some other Ubuntu version on that USB drive.

I did not need to do that because, for me, the solution was simpler.  Before I got very far into this project at all, as advised, I tried hitting Esc when I booted, so as to bring up the boot menu.  That gave me an option to boot from the USB drive.  And it worked.  I didn't know whether this would address all of the needs and interests that had prompted me to try booting other programs (e.g., Hiren's, XBoot, Grub4DOS) in my previous try.  But for the moment, I was happy.

Windows 7: Recording Streaming Audio

I had previously tried, but failed, to get my system to record streaming audio.  The concept, in this mission, was that I wanted to be able to capture, in a file, the sound that I was hearing in my headphones.  Seemed like a simple expectation, and as I recalled it had been almost automatic on my previous system.  But it wasn't happening on my current motherboard, a Gigabyte GA-MA785GM-US2H, so I searched for solutions.

The first requirement seemed to be to use the right software.  Not every audio program is capable of recording streaming video.  The free Audacity program could, so I was using that.  I found a video and a webpage that were supposedly going to help me, and probably I did incorporate some of their suggestions into the approach that eventually worked for me.  The only suggestion that I recall making a difference was that, as recommended, I was using the version 1.3.13 beta of Audacity, not an older one, though at this point I'm not absolutely certain that was necessary either.

Ultimately, I found two ways to record streaming audio.  One was to use a video capture program and convert the resulting file to audio.  I'd had tried a number of video capture programs, with very mixed results.  The only one that seemed to work reliably was Debut, and it cost money after its free trial period.  Ultimately, I did buy a copy of that.  For the conversion, I used Oxelon.

The other approach was to use an audio cable to connect the computer's headphone jack directly to its microphone jack.  Basically, I would be recording what the headphones were supposed to be hearing.  Sadly, this didn't work as advertised, when I used the actual jacks on the computer itself.  But I was able to make it work in a different way.  I bought a Syba SD-CM-UAUD USB-to-audio adapter.  No software required.  I just plugged it into a USB port, plugged both ends of the patch cable into it, and it worked.  Actually, to make that work, I had to set Audacity as follows: the audio host was Windows DirectSound; the output device was Primary Sound Driver; the input device was Microphone.

The Syba device gave me really loud volume.  Later, I had to fiddle with Control Panel > Sound to get all my devices back the way they were before.  But so far, it seemed worth it.

ASUS Eee PC: Booting from USB: First Cut

I needed a way to boot an ASUS Eee PC with Windows 7 installed.  The mission was to look at, and possibly replace or delete, a certain file in a particular directory on the Eee's drive C.  The Eee didn't have a CD/DVD drive, so it seemed that what I needed was a bootable USB drive with file management capabilities.  I knew the Eee was capable of being booted that way, because I had already successfully booted it with USB drives containing Acronis True Image and GParted.  Unfortunately, I had not succeeded in previous attempts to boot Ubuntu or some other program or operating system, so as to examine files and folders.  This post describes some more attempts along those lines, oriented specifically toward getting various programs to boot an Eee from a USB drive.

Hiren's Boot CD

More than a year earlier, I had made a similar attempt related to Windows XP.  In that attempt and previously, I had become familiar with various bootable USB jump drive packages, including the Universal Boot CD for Windows (UBCD4Win) and BartPE.  It now appeared that Hiren's Boot CD (HBCD) was an especially good option.  I noticed that it included DBAN, GParted, and other tools that I would like to have on a bootable USB thumb drive.  Following the instructions provided by Hiren and Pankaj (as also shown, somewhat confusingly, on a different website I found later), I took these steps:

1. I plugged in my USB flash drive -- 4GB, though they said 512MB was sufficient.  I suspected that a drive larger than 4GB would fail due to their use of FAT32 formatting.
2. I downloaded and ran their USB formatting program (changing no settings).  Then I downloaded and ran their grub4dos program as Administrator.  The device I selected was a Disk (not File).  It was a 4GB USB drive, so on my system that was hd3, which they described as "3851M" (i.e., not quite 4,000 megabytes).  I clicked Refresh next to Part List and selected Whole Disk (MBR).  I clicked Install.
3. I downloaded the Hiren's BootCD zip file.
4. I unzipped the BootCD zip file and found that it contained an ISO.  I didn't want to burn a CD in order to proceed with the next steps, so I tried using Virtual CDROM to position that ISO as a virtual CDROM drive. Specifically, in VCD, I clicked Mount, navigated to the ISO, selected it, and clicked OK. The mount failed.  I saw that Virtual CloneDrive (VCD) seemed to be more frequently downloaded, so I tried that.  When I started it, it gave me only a few options.  I adjusted those.  Now I had an icon in the system tray.  I right-clicked on that and got an option to mount drive G, which Windows Explorer was now showing as "BD-ROM Drive."  That opened up a dialog.  I navigated to the ISO.  That seemed to work.  The HBCD instructions said to copy everything from the mounted ISO to the USB flash drive, so I did.  There was some flaky behavior here:  at one point I basically had to restart Windows Explorer to see the contents of the mounted ISO again, but in the end I was able to copy those contents to the jump drive.

With those steps done, I plugged the USB drive into the Eee and rebooted.  I had to hit F2 repeatedly when it first started booting, because I had learned it did not remember boot settings.  I set the USB drive as the first drive to boot.  The USB stick did not boot.  The relevant error message seemed to be, "Cannot find GRLDR."  In other words, the grub4dos step seemed to have failed.  I looked at the directions and tried again.  This time, I skipped the formatting step -- the drive was already formatted -- and went directly to the grub4dos step presented on the alternate HBCD webpage that I had more recently discovered.  But everything seemed the same.  I tried booting the Eee again with the USB stick.  Same result.  I looked at the HBCD FAQs page.  It said this:

If you are getting GRLDR error, or if usb booting is halting with a blinking dos window, or if you are facing with smilar situations, try using syslinux to boot grub4dos. To do that, download syslinux.zip (145 KB), extract its contents, run ‘RunMe.bat’ inside of the extracted folder and follow its steps.

Oy.  But, OK, I downloaded and unzipped syslinux.zip and clicked on its RunMe.bat file.  It did copy files to the USB drive, as promised.  Now what?  I tried booting the Eee with the USB stick again.  That definitely worked.  I was now looking at a GRUB4DOS menu that listed a half-dozen programs.  Unfortunately, none of them was HBCD.  I tried a Google search for info on the HBCD "cannot find GRLDR" error.  Got a couple dozen hits, mostly in Vietnamese.  Bizarre.  I didn't like Bing, but an equivalent Bing search didn't have that problem.  Regardless, I didn't see a solution.  Back at one of the HBCD instructions pages, I noticed that they said I should have run grub4dos as Administrator.  I hadn't done that.  I was already logged in as Administrator, but maybe that wasn't sufficient.  I right-clicked on grubinst_gui.exe and clicked Run as Administrator.  That brought up the same Grub4Dos Installer dialog as before.

I went through the steps again.  In the process of abandoning the one HBCD instruction page for the other, I had also overlooked another step:  "Copy grldr and menu.lst (from HBCD folder) [actually found in the grub4dos\grub folder] to the usb drive."  I did that now.  The menu.lst (that's MENU.LST, with an L, not MENU.1ST, with a one) file overwrote the one that syslinux had placed on the USB drive.  I wasn't sure how this was going to work:  I hadn't removed syslinux from the USB drive.  But I gave it a try.  This time, I got a somewhat longer Grub4DOS menu.  Unfortunately, I didn't see most of the tools that had interested me originally; and after a moment, the computer went ahead and tried to load Windows 7, even though I had not to my knowledge issued any command of that sort.  I rebooted.  It seemed I must have left the cursor sitting on the option for "Custom Menu ... (Use HBCDCustomizer to add your files)," because that one was ready to boot automatically in just a few seconds.  Hitting Enter on that item opened a longer list.

What I wanted, in the particular situation, was something like Ubuntu, with which I could use a GUI to change files in a particular folder on the Windows 7 programs drive C.  I decided to try Eeebuntu 3.0.1 Netbook Remix.  It gave me an error message, and within 10 seconds I was back at the Grub4DOS menu.  I tried Ubuntu 10.04 Netbook Remix.  I tried Ubuntu 10.04 (GNOME Desktop x86).  All of these were giving me "Error 15:  File not found."  They seemed to be trying to load an Ubuntu (or whatever) ISO.  Was I supposed to have that on a separate USB drive, also plugged into the netbook?  I tried Eeebuntu again.  It seemed to be looking for eeebuntu-3.0.1-nbr.iso.  A search led to Aurora and Wikipedia webpages indicating that Eeebuntu 3 was based on Ubuntu 9.04, which at this point was two years old and outdated in a number of ways.  I wasn't that much more excited about the HBCD option to load Ubuntu 10.04, also a year old.

I had been thinking, or hoping, that HBCD would somehow miraculously combine all those dozens of CDs on one USB stick, but now that was just not materializing.  If I was going to be using HBCD just to boot Ubuntu, why not have the latest Ubuntu on a stick?  Make it simpler and more up-to-date.  I went to the Ubuntu download webpage and noticed that they were providing instructions that simply involved the Universal USB Installer and a downloaded Ubuntu ISO.  I ran my copy of Universal USB Installer and saw that it was willing to install Ubuntu 11.04 on a stick.  I was about to proceed with that, but then I wondered whether some other Linux distribution would be better for the Eee.  A search led to one webpage in which some people said that plain old Ubuntu was fine.  Another webpage suggested Leeenux.  I was familiar with Ubuntu, so I decided to try that (again).

When I had pretty much settled on the approach of using Universal USB Installer to download and install the ISO on my USB drive, it occurred to me that the advantage of HBCD was that I could have a bunch of ISOs on a companion USB drive, and could boot them all with the HBCD USB drive.  In this concept, I couldn't do it all with one drive, but I could do it with two, especially now that USB drive capacities were increasing:  my second USB drive could hold a dozen ISOs.  I revisited the option, presented in HBCD, of using HBCD Customizer (above).  I was thinking this might be a way to run Ubuntu 11.04 among others.  Thing is, I couldn't find it.  I didn't want to download it from just any random webpage -- it could be virus-ridden -- but it seemed like WOT-banned sites were featuring it.

XBoot

Another search led to some indications that the UBCD4Win was also customizable, so I turned to that possibility.  This search seemed more promising.  On closer examination, though, it appeared that creating this device required a Windows XP CD.  I had one, but others might not.  That requirement would also presumably have prevented me from using it to install Ubuntu.  So I turned to its cousin, UBCD (not for Windows).  A search led ultimately to Pendrivelinux.com, where I discovered XBoot, which was yet another possibility (along with YUMI and the Linux-based MultiSystem. The XBoot instructions required me to download the latest XBoot as well as the other ISOs that I would want to use.  I decided to start with ISOs for GParted, Ubuntu 11.04 (which, as I recalled, would not automatically contain GParted), Darik's Boot & Nuke (patched for XBoot), and Acronis True Image Home.  I had purchased a copy of Acronis, and would have been glad to recommend a freeware alternative, but I wasn't immediately finding one with an ISO.  There would probably be other ISOs I would want to add later, but this would do for now.  I wasn't as interested in some of the programs that were supposedly included in Hiren's Boot CD, for instance, because I was keeping a copy of my customized Start Menu (containing portable applications) on a separate USB drive, and many of the programs included in Hiren's were already on that Start Menu.  Many of those programs required an operating system (especially Windows) to be booted already, so I wasn't sure how or why I would be using them on a multiboot USB drive, though of course it could be handy to have everything on one large USB drive.

So anyway, I downloaded, unzipped, and ran XBoot.  It was a portable, which was nice.  I had created a folder for the four ISOs mentioned in the previous paragraph (i.e., GParted, Ubuntu, DBAN, and Acronis), so now I just dragged those ISOs over and dropped them on the XBoot program.  The instructions seemed to say I was supposed to do something with the QEMU and Edit MultiBoot USB tabs, but I couldn't quite figure it out.  I decided to start simply, by clicking the Create USB button on the first (Create Multiboot USB/ISO) tab.  This brought up a dialog giving me the options of using Syslinux or Grub4dos as my bootloader.  They recommended Syslinux, so I went with that.  The dialog automatically identified my USB drive.  XBoot then seemed to be copying my ISOs to the USB drive.  When it was done, it said, "USB created successfully!!  Check by running it on QEMU?"  I wasn't sure if that meant it was going to reboot the system into the QEMU operating system.  I wasn't in the mood to have my desktop system rebooted right then, so I said no.  Then I looked and saw that QEMU was just an emulator, so I probably could have tested it safely.  It wasn't too late:  the QEMU tab within XBoot allowed me (after a Refresh) to run the USB drive and, by golly, it seemed to work.

I plugged the USB drive into the Eee and rebooted it.  As in QEMU, it gave me the option to go into Utility, Linux, or Help.  The Utility submenu had Acronis, GParted, and DBAN.  I went into Linux in the main menu.  Ubuntu was the only option there.  I chose that option.  It ran.  I was able to access folders and go online in Firefox in Ubuntu.  Later, I discovered that, unlike the three other ISOs,  Acronis did not boot.  Acronis could be made bootable on a USB drive by installing the Acronis software and using its Bootable Rescue Media Builder.  I had already done that with another USB drive.  What I needed now was apparently not an ISO of the Acronis CD, but rather an ISO of that USB drive.  I used ImgBurn to create that.  Then I went back into XBoot.  There didn't seem to be an alternative to redoing the whole bootable USB creation process, so I did that.  This time, when the process finished, I tested all of the USB drive boot options in QEMU.  I saw that it had not deleted the previous options; I now had two Acronis entries.  One hung the system; the other successfully started Acronis.  I wanted to edit this menu, so I went to XBoot's Edit MultiBoot USB tab.  When I clicked the "Edit Syslinux menu file" button, I got an error:  "No application is associated with the specified file for this operation."  When I clicked Edit Grub4dos Menu File, it asked what program I wanted to use to edit it.  I tried Notepad.  That worked.  It opened menu.lst, which turned out to be in the root (top level) of the USB drive.  Menu.lst told me that the menu for the Utility section was on the USB drive too, in /boot/grub4dos/utility.lst.  My editing efforts were not too successful, so ultimately I just wiped the drive and started over.  I was not able to get Acronis to work, and in a subsequent retry the Ubuntu also stopped working.  I reformatted the USB drive (not Quick Format) and then redid the XBoot process without Acronis, and now the Ubuntu was failing to load.  I tried that twice.

Assuming I could get Ubuntu working again on the USB drive, the solution, so far, was to use XBoot, a Windows program, to load several program ISOs on a single USB drive.  The Eee would boot from this USB drive and would give me a menu allowing me to choose among those programs.  There seemed to be no practical limit on the number of ISOs that could be loaded this way.  The USB drive seemed to be capable of running just one ISO at a time, and Ubuntu loaded from the USB drive did not seem able to see the contents of the USB drive itself, so it did not appear that stray utilities added to the USB drive would be available to operating systems (e.g., Ubuntu) booted from the USB drive.

Grub4DOS

I wanted to try again to get a multiboot USB drive that would work with Acronis as well as with Ubuntu, DBAN, and GParted.  I found detailed instructions on using Grub4DOS in a way that seemed to meet this need.  The steps were as follows:

1. Download and unzip the needed files.  These were Grub4DOS 0.4.4 (2009-06-20) and the Grub4DOS installer (grubinst-1.1-bin-w32-2008-01-01.zip).
2. In the Grub4DOS-Installer folder, right-click and run grubinst_gui.exe as Administrator.  (This was familiar from the steps described above.)  Select Disk, click its adjacent Refresh button, and select the drive on which you want to install Grub4DOS.  The size of the drive was a clue.  In my case, I was installing to a 4GB flash drive, so I selected the one that was 3812MB in size.
3. Still in the Grub4DOS installer, click the Part List Refresh button.  This time, I got an error:  "Invalid partition table, if you still want to install, use the --skip-mbr-test."  This was presumably why Ubuntu had failed to boot on the last couple of tries with XBoot (above).  But I had already reformatted it!  Some advised using the HP USB Disk Storage Format Tool (HPUSBDisk.exe).  I closed down the Grub4DOS Installer and tried that.  I set it to do a quick format and not to create a DOS startup disk.  That did the trick; I was now able to go back in and select "Whole Disk" next to the Part List, as advised back in the Grub4DOS instructions.
4. Unlike the situation above, the instructions this time advised checking the "Don't search floppy" box (but nothing else) and then clicking Install.  That succeeded.  I closed the Grub4DOS Installer.
5. From the unzipped Grub4DOS download folder, I copied grldr to the USB drive.
6. Skipping to section 3 of the instructions (since I wanted multiple ISOs on the USB drive), I ran Acronis True Image Home on the desktop computer, where I had installed it.  I went to the Main Screen > Create bootable media.  When I got to the Bootable Media Type Selection section, I chose ISO Image.  I saved it to the same folder on the hard drive where I had my GParted and other ISOs.
7. I created menu.lst in that ISOs folder, so I'd have it in case I wanted to create another USB drive or retry with this one.  To create menu.lst, I started by copying and pasting this text into Notepad:

   timeout 10
   default 0
   
   title Acronis True Image Home 2011
   map --mem (hd0,0)/AcronisTrueImageHome2011.iso (hd32)
   map --hook
   chainloader (hd32)
   boot
   
   title CommandLine
   commandline
   
   title Reboot
   reboot
   
   title Halt
   halt

   The parts that could be edited were the title (Acronis True Image Home 2011), which could be anything I wanted, and the ISO's filename (AcronisTrueImageHome2011.iso), which had to match what I had actually called the ISO.  (Spaces in the ISO's filename would apparently have been a bad idea.)  I didn't change the (hd32) part of the "map" line.  The "--mem" part of the first "map" line was optional.  It apparently made the ISO load into RAM.  With 2GB of RAM on my Eee, I felt that I could do this with all of my ISOs.  If that had failed, I could have removed "--mem" from that line.
8. I copied the finished menu.lst over to the root of the jump drive. So now the USB drive contained two files:  grldr and menu.lst.
9. I copied the Acronis ISO over to the USB drive, so that menu.lst would be able to find it.  The instructions said I could have put it into a folder of its own, as long as the map command in menu.lst could find it (by referring to e.g., /subfolder/AcronisTrueImageHome2011.iso).
10. While I was at it, I copied the other ISOs (GParted, Ubuntu, DBAN) as well.  I used the patched DBAN ISO mentioned above.
11. I edited menu.lst so that it would include references to all four ISOs.  As just shown, it already had five lines referring to the Acronis ISO, beginning with "title."  So I copied, pasted, and edited those five lines for each of the other ISOs I wanted to boot.  Here, again, I was allowed to change only the title itself (e.g., changing "Acronis True Image Home 2011" in the copied "title" line to GParted, DBAN, or Ubuntu) and the name of the related ISO on the first "map" line.
12. I changed the timeout from 10 to 20 seconds.
13. Again, I made these changes to the copy of menu.lst that I had created in the ISOs folder on the hard drive, so that I would have a copy of it, and then copied it over to the jump drive.

I tried booting the resulting USB drive in the Eee.  It came up with a genuine menu.  First time around, it tried to boot Ubuntu automatically after 20 seconds' delay (that being the first item on my menu.lst), and failed.  Second time, I didn't let that happen; I arrowed down to Acronis (next item) and tried that.  That worked.  When I exited Acronis, it rebooted, and this time I tried DBAN.  That worked too.  Another reboot, another program:  GParted did not work.  It gave me a screenful of information, including this:

BOOT FAILED!
This Debian Live image failed to boot.
Please file a bug against the 'live-boot' package or email the Debian Live mailing list at debian-life@lists.debian.org, making sure to note the exact version, name and distribution of the image you were attempting to boot. . . .
Unable to find a medium containing a live file system.
BusyBox v.1.18.4 (Debian 1:1.18.4-1) built-in shell (ash)
Enter 'help' for a list of built-in commands.
/bin/sh: can't access tty; job control turned off
(initramfs)

It seemed that the Ubuntu/Debian live images (Ubuntu 11.04 and GParted) were not working with Grub4DOS.  A search suggested that others were having this problem too.  One post suggested that changes involving "kernel" and "initrd" might help, but I was not sure how to configure them.  I wondered if the --mem option was screwing up the Linux items, so I edited menu.lst to remove that option from those items.  For GParted, that worked, to the point of giving me the initial menu, but then it led back to the BOOT FAILED! screen (above).  For Ubuntu, I wound up back at the same message as I had gotten first time -- similar to the one just quoted, but much briefer.  It said something about BusyBox but then said, "(initramfs) Unable to find a medium containing a live file system."

Grub4DOS:  Ubuntu

I was perhaps experiencing the problem that "Some linux distributions just refuse to boot from an ISO file on a USB drive."  Of course, Ubuntu could be booted from a USB stick; it was the ISO part that was causing the problem.  This was apparently "experimental."  It seemed that the "kernel" and "initrd" commands could be copied literally, at least for Ubuntu 10.10; I wasn't finding much advice for 11.04.  The approach shown in a couple of websites was like this:

title Ubuntu 10.10
find --set-root ubuntu-10.10-desktop-i386.iso
map ubuntu-10.10-desktop-i386.iso (0xff)
map --hook
root (0xff)
kernel /casper/vmlinuz file=/cdrom/preseed/ubuntu.seed boot=casper iso-scan/filename=ubuntu-10.10-desktop-i386.iso splash
initrd /casper/initrd.lz

I adjusted menu.lst to replace the previous Ubuntu entry with these lines, copied the Ubuntu 10.10 ISO to the USB drive, and tried that.  (Note:  the line beginning with kernel is long; it wraps.  The next line after "kernel ..." is "initrd ...")  This gave me "Error 60:  File for drive emulation must be in one contiguous disk area."  A search led to the advice to use either Contig or WinContig to defragment the ISO on the USB drive -- to defragment a single file, that is, not necessarily the whole drive.  I was curious whether this kind of separate tool was necessary.  In Windows Explorer, I right-clicked > Properties > Tools tab > Defragmentation.  I selected the USB drive and clicked "Defragment disk."  In seconds, it said, "0% fragmented."  I tried booting again.  Now it said "Error 15: File not found" for the Ubuntu 10.10 ISO.  I couldn't figure this out:  the file was right there.  I re-copied the ISO over from the hard drive to the USB drive and, this time, I defragmented it with WinContig.  It offered to run on the whole USB drive after all, so I went ahead with that.  Basically, I was wondering if there was some kind of magic about the WinContig way of defragmenting.  It took much longer than the Windows defragmenter had taken -- a couple of minutes, altogether, just for that little USB drive.  Eventually I realized that it was hung.  I tried to use Task Manager (Ctrl-Alt-Del) to kill it, but that didn't work.  I rebooted the system.

I tried booting the Eee again with the USB stick.  This time, I got "Error 27: Unrecognized command."  I thought that maybe the Ubuntu ISO could not be in the root folder, so I put it into a subfolder called ISOs, and modified the three references to it (in the menu.lst lines quoted above) accordingly.  (The final menu.lst is shown below.)  Since things were not going well, I went back and re-did the 13 steps listed above.  This time around, they were like this:

1. Run the HP USB Disk Storage Format Tool on the USB drive.
2. Run grubinst_gui.exe as Administrator.
3. Copy grldr from the unzipped Grub4DOS download folder to the "MultiBoot" folder on the hard drive where I was saving everything that I would be copying to the USB drive.  That folder now contained grldr and menu.lst in its top level, and the ISOs in its "ISOs" folder.
4. Copy the contents of the MultiBoot folder to the USB drive.

This time, we were back to the good old days, when the Ubuntu ISO would actually get as far as loading its splash screen and seeming like it was going to start.  Evidently it helped to start over and/or to put the ISO in a subfolder.  (I wondered whether properly ejecting the USB drive from the desktop, rather than just yanking it out, made a difference too.)  And then, woo hoo, we had liftoff!  Ubuntu was operational.  I fiddled with it for a minute.  Nautilus worked; Firefox worked.  Fantastic.  I quit Ubuntu and tried the other ISOs on the menu.  GParted, splash screen ... BOOT FAILED.  Rats.  Acronis:  Orbit!  Finally, DBAN:  no problem.

Grub4DOS:  GParted and Parted Magic

So how to make GParted work?  A search led eventually to some suggestions that Parted Magic (which evidently contained GParted among other things) or RIPLinuX (which evidently contained Parted Magic plus) might be the superior tool and easier to put on USB.  I was willing to use any of the above, as long as I could figure out how to put it on a multiboot USB -- preferably, at this point, using Grub4DOS.  I looked into Parted Magic, reasoning that, again, I probably wouldn't need all the stuff on RIPLinuX, and it might load slower.  The contemporary way to put Parted Magic on a USB stick by itself was to use Unetbootin.  But how to put it on a multiboot USB?  One webpage claimed that I could download and unzip a USB version, install its contents to the root of the USB drive, and it would run with a modification of menu.lst.  Sadly, that version was no longer available at the cited SourceForge link.  That webpage made similar claims for Memtest86+, BartPE, and UBCD, and I was tempted to experiment with those as well.  I found other webpages providing seemingly easy instructions for adding Hiren's BootCD and Memtest86+ as well.  Most tempting was the option of adding a Windows 7 Recovery CD.  I decided to return to these possibilities later, time permitting.

But continuing with the Parted Magic investigation, I began to find that I probably should have called the subfolder "images" rather than "ISOs" -- referring, there, to the folder on the USB drive where I had put the ISO downloads.  So I made that change in menu.lst and in the folder structure now.  Then I found a thread that seemed to offer a way to make Parted Magic 5.10 work with Grub4DOS.  I downloaded the ISO of that fairly recent version and put it into the images folder on the desktop computer.  I replaced the GParted lines of menu.lst; and when the Parted Magic 5.10 ISO was finished downloading, I opened it with 7zip, extracted the pmagic folder, and put that into the images folder as well -- because that's what they did in that thread, for what reason I had no idea.  I copied the revised contents of the MultiBoot folder on the hard drive to the USB drive and tried booting the Eee with it.  The Ubuntu ran (again); the Parted Magic ran too, though for a minute there I thought it was hung.  Apparently it was taking it a while to load itself into memory.  It really had a lot of tools in it -- not only GParted but also Ghost for Linux, Partition Image, etc.  I didn't think I would be needing much else in the near future.  This success with Parted Magic version 5.10 made it unnecessary for me to look further into other posts relating to versions 5.9, 5.8, 5.7, 5.6, 5.5, 5.5, 4.5, or 4.3.  Acronis still ran, and DBAN still ran.  I was nearly home.

Grub4DOS:  Windows 7 Recovery CD

That discovery (above) of the possibility of adding a Windows 7 Recovery CD to my multiboot USB stick was just too good to pass up.  The instructions said that I would need to start by downloading Microsoft's Windows 7 System Recovery Disc.  This gave me a small torrent link called "Windows 7 32-bit Repair Disc.torrent."  I had already installed uTorrentPortable, so I used that to run that link and download the 143MB recovery disc.  When that was downloaded, I had an ISO that, once again, I could mount as a virtual CD using Virtual Clone Drive.  I downloaded and ran WinSetupFromUSB.  It looked like this might be destructive of my hard-won success on the USB drive, so I did this with another, blank USB drive.

In WinSetupFromUSB, I clicked Refresh to see the correct USB drive.  I clicked the Bootice button.  A dialog popped up.  I selected Process MBR and then Grub4DOS and clicked Install/Config.  I checked "Don't search floppy for GRLDR" but otherwise left everything else as it was, and clicked "Save to disk."  That seemed to be the end of Bootice, so I backed out of there; but then the Bootice dialog returned.  I killed it again, and this time it stayed dead.  Back in the main WinSetupFromUSB dialog, I realized I was suffering from a dearth of guidance.  The webpage I had been loosely following really wasn't cutting it.  Back to the previous one.  It seemed I should have formatted the USB drive while I was in Bootice, so I did that now:  USB-HDD, single partition, FAT32.  Now redo the Process MBR - Grub4DOS step just mentioned.   Now, back in the WinSetupFromUSB dialog again, I clicked the Vista / Win7 option, navigated to the virtual CD drive, and clicked GO.  A minute later, it was done.  I clicked Test in QEMU > GO.  It said, "Windows is loading files ..."  That took a while.  Then QEMU produced a BSOD.  This, I decided, was a project for another day.  A worthy one, if it worked, but a whole new undertaking, by the time I got all these other tools (Parted Magic, Acronis, DBAN, Ubuntu) working on that other USB drive.

Summary

It seemed that WinSetupFromUSB might be a good place to start, for someone who was beginning a voyage of discovery, on the way to creating a multiboot USB drive, and had some time to spare.  WinSetupFromUSB allowed the same Grub4DOS tool that I had found useful in the approach I took.  My approach is summarized in the four steps enumerated above:  run the HP USB Disk Storage Format Tool on the USB drive; run grubinst_gui.exe as Administrator; copy grldr from the unzipped Grub4DOS download folder to the "MultiBoot" folder on the hard drive where I was saving everything that I would be copying to the USB drive; download the relevant ISOs to the "images" subfolder in that MultiBoot folder; and then copy the contents of the MultiBoot folder to the USB drive.  Those contents included the menu.lst file, which in the end looked like this:

timeout 20
default 0

title Ubuntu 10.10
find --set-root /images/ubuntu-10.10-desktop-i386.iso
map /images/ubuntu-10.10-desktop-i386.iso (0xff)
map --hook
root (0xff)
kernel /casper/vmlinuz file=/cdrom/preseed/ubuntu.seed boot=casper iso-scan/filename=/images/ubuntu-10.10-desktop-i386.iso splash
initrd /casper/initrd.lz

title Parted Magic 5.10
root (hd0,0)
map --heads=0 --sectors-per-track=0 (hd0,0)/images/pmagic-5.10.iso (0xff) || map --heads=0 --sectors-per-track=0 --mem (hd0,0)/images/pmagic-5.10.iso (0xff)
map --hook
chainloader (0xff)

title Acronis True Image Home 2011
map --mem (hd0,0)/images/AcronisTrueImageHome2011.iso (hd32)
map --hook
chainloader (hd32)
boot

title Darik's Boot and Nuke
map --mem (hd0,0)/images/dban-2.2.6_i586-fixed.iso (hd32)
map --hook
chainloader (hd32)
boot

title CommandLine
commandline

title Reboot
reboot

title Halt
halt

A Two-Computers-Per-User Desktop Arrangement

I was spending a lot of time at my desk, doing word processing and other typical desktop work.  For this purpose I was using a customized Windows 7 installation on two networked computers for maximum productivity.  This post describes that setup.

I had previously thought that, ideally, I would have four computers:  one laptop; one test machine to hook up the occasional hard drive or other component for wiping, testing, etc.; and two desktop machines running side-by-side.  Since then, however, I had switched from Ubuntu back to Windows and had found this to be a good move.  So now I was doing very little testing and tinkering with hardware.  Therefore, I dismantled and sold the parts from the fourth computer.

With almost all of my work happening on just two computers, and with a stable Win7 installation on each, the focus now was on getting the most out of them.  I was using two desktop computers instead of one because there were still many occasions when a computer would experience downtime.  I would be doing drive maintenance or imaging, or would still have to reboot Windows now and then to clear its head or to complete a program installation or upgrade, or Win7 would be running just fine but there would be some scanning or something else going on that would tend to monopolize the machine for practical purposes.  I was not yet very impressed with multiple desktop software and was considering a return to VMware or some other virtual machine software, perhaps in a virtual appliance, though I wasn't sure I wanted to get back into the performance issues that had prompted me to try to use a native and/or bootable virtual hard disk or RAID array to improve the really bad performance I had started getting in VMware.  So the second computer was also useful as a simple way of having a pretty solid alternate desktop.  I could start up a project or leave a set of folders open there and just visit it occasionally, when the primary computer was doing its own maintenance or was otherwise unavailable for a while.

The starting point for this two-computer arrangement was to set up two machines that were almost identical in terms of hardware and software.  In previous years, I had thought it was best to have dissimilar machines, so as to maximize resources.  One machine or the other would have the right hardware or software to deal with almost any kind of system problem.  That belief was probably justified for some purposes.  Now, however, I was less patient with that, and it also seemed less necessary.  A lot of the old problems had gone away.  Meanwhile, it was much easier to learn how to maintain and troubleshoot just one set of problems, rather than have to learn the whys and wherefores of divergent sets of hardware and software.  For purposes of getting my work done, Windows 7 was a significant improvement over operating systems I had used previously, including Windows XP and Ubuntu 10.10, in terms of networking and other capabilities.

The customized Win7 installation (see link above) was not as easy as a canned, plain-vanilla installation, but once I had it set up, it had some advantages.  One important step was to make my work files available on both computers.  My first attempt in this regard was to use a Synology network-attached storage (NAS) unit as a simplified file server, but that hadn't worked so well for me.  In the second attempt, I used my home network (basically, just a router and cables to the two computers, though possibly a crossover cable would have sufficed even without the router).  After some contemplation, I went with GoodSync to keep the two computers directly synchronized with one another.  This was an important development.  When combined with appropriate program settings (e.g., setting Microsoft Word to AutoRecover files every minute), it meant that, if the computer I was working on suddenly crashed or otherwise became unavailable, I could usually switch over to the other machine and pick up right where I left off.

I used GoodSync to synchronize my data partition (drive D), not the program partition (drive C).  I also used it to synchronize parts of the INSTALL partition, including particularly the funky but advantageous shared Start menu.  GoodSync did not need to be running on both computers, so I installed it on computer A.  As the installation evolved, I found that computer A was handling most of my computer maintenance and other functions, while I did more of my moment-by-moment productivity stuff on computer B.  In particular, computer A was becoming my backup hub.  I would save a file on computer B; GoodSync would copy it to computer A; and then my backup software would copy it to other drives.  After a variety of unpleasant backup surprises, I had evolved to two distinct backup systems running on computer A.  In the first backup system, I was using Robocopy, as part of my customized installation (above), to make frequent, incremental backups to a separate partition on computer A.  This was one of the few regards in which computer A differed from computer B in terms of hardware:  it had three hard drives rather than two, so as to speed this internal copying (since it was faster to copy from one hard drive to another, rather than between partitions on the same drive) and make it safer (since a failure of one drive would usually not affect the other).  In the second backup system, I was using Beyond Compare to do daily manual backups to an external drive that I could carry or store offsite as needed.  These were manual in the sense that I had to click things to make them happen, and could therefore examine or at least spot-check what was going to be changed, if I wanted to.

Again, I could still use either computer to do my work, since they both had the same synchronized files and nearly identical software installations.  Nonetheless, as the functions of the two computers diverged, I found that I was not really utilizing both monitors most of the time.  On computer B, I tended to be opening PDFs, Word docs, Excel spreadsheets, Windows Explorer sessions, and webpages, among which I would copy text, links, and other materials.  I could open some of that stuff on computer A instead, but it was cumbersome to have this happening on two different computers, and for the most part it actually was not happening on computer A.  That computer, and its associated monitor, were mostly just sitting there, working up a file comparison in Beyond Compare or otherwise doing things that did not really need to be watched constantly.

What I really wanted was to make monitor A available for computer A, when I wanted to see what was happening on computer A, but to have monitor A also available for computer B, when I was doing my ongoing work on computer B.  This called for a keyboard-video-mouse (KVM) switch.  The PS/2 type of KVM was better for purposes of providing keyboard and mouse input during BIOS setup and in programs that would boot from a CD (e.g., Acronis Drive Image) and would therefore be at least partly unresponsive to a USB mouse and/or keyboard.  Unfortunately, I did not realize that the type of motherboard I had installed in both computers did not have two PS/2 ports, so I had to use a USB KVM.  It also seemed that I might have to spring for a more expensive DVI-compatible KVM, since I'd gotten some poor video performance when I had connected the monitor to the computer using the older D-Sub rather than the newer DVI kind of cable.  In recent months I had been using the KVM only for the keyboard, while leaving each monitor dedicated to one computer and experimenting with having a separate mouse for each computer, so that I could click without having to transfer keyboard (and, optionally, monitor) focus between computers.  It had lately occurred to me, though, that the D-Sub video quality problems might just be due to the quality of the video circuits on the motherboard.  So at this point I was planning to get a dedicated video card for each computer and see whether its D-Sub connection would work acceptably, in which case I could use the USB/D-Sub KVM for the keyboard and for D-Sub video with monitor A.  In other words, monitor B would continue to be dedicated to computer B, but monitor A would run to the KVM and could thus toggle between computers A and B.

This left the problem that, as I had discovered, when I was not seeing events on computer A, I tended not to use that computer.  That was not terrible -- it would still be there as a running backup, ready to jump into service when I needed it, unless it hibernated itself in the meantime -- but experience suggested that, if I could not just glance to see what was happening on computer A, I would tend not to toggle over there on the KVM and take a peek.  I thought of two solutions to this.  One was to set up a reminder that would prompt me, every hour or two, to interrupt what I was doing on computer B, toggle the KVM, and look at events on computer A as displayed on monitor A.  I suspected I might tend to disregard that kind of reminder, but I decided to give it a try.  An alternative was to get a small, dedicated monitor that would just always be displaying events on computer A, though I realized its tiny resolution would not very well display all the stuff that would tend to appear on my widescreen monitor A.  It looked like I could get a monochrome 10-inch Miracle Business MT209A CRT on eBay for $25 including shipping, but I didn't want the clutter or the extra power consumption.  What seemed like a more practical option was rather to go with a full-sized monitor dedicated to computer A.

That's where this matter rested for the time being.