Windows Explorer Replacements: FreeCommander and Explorer++

In a previous post, I looked at replacements for Windows Explorer ("WinEx"), including especially FreeCommander.  The runner-up, at that point, was Explorer++.  Further experience with FreeCommander prompted me to take a closer look at Explorer++ after all.  This post provides further information on these two utilities.

As I used FreeCommander, I was surprised to find that a few right-click (context menu) options were missing.  For example, I often used LockHunter to find out why Windows was not letting me move or delete a certain file or folder.  But in FreeCommander, I was no longer seeing the context menu question, "What is locking this file?"  That option did continue to appear in Explorer++, as it had appeared in WinEx.  One possible explanation was that FreeCommander did not offer a 64-bit version, whereas Explorer++ did, and I was using the 64-bit version of LockHunter.

Another problem in both FreeCommander and Explorer++ was that I no longer had the option to create a new text file in a specified folder.  That option had been available in WinEx, as I recalled, via File > New > Text File.  I was pretty sure there was a way to create a new text file in FreeCommander.  It seemed to me that I had done so by accident, once or twice, while trying to do something else with a familiar command from WinEx.  But I was not seeing that option on the menu nor in the list of shortcuts, and likewise in Explorer++.  Workarounds in either program were to open a command window in the selected folder and type one of these options:

• copy con filename.txt Enter.  Then type the text.  End with F6 or Ctrl-Z.
• echo [a line of text to put into new text file] > filename.txt
• notepad filename.txt Enter

Both FreeCommander and Explorer++ made the command window available in multiple ways:  via Ctrl-D or menu pick in FreeCommander, via menu pick in Explorer++, and via toolbar icon in both programs.  Both also allowed the customized context menu option to "Open command window here," available through Ultimate Windows Tweaker.  But the toolbar itself, the most readily accessible of these options, was smaller and less obtrusive in Explorer++ because it could be made to fit on the same line (at the top of the screen) as the address bar and the list of drives, whereas FreeCommander insisted on putting the toolbar (if I opted to display it) on its own separate row, and with somewhat larger icons.

Unlike FreeCommander, it was not necessary to display a toolbar listing all drives in Explorer++, because the navigation pane already showed all drives, as in WinEx.  Also like WinEx, Explorer++ allowed me to customize the toolbar area by right-clicking on it.  By contrast, FreeCommander required me to go to Extras > Settings > View > Toolbar; and once there, I had to save changes to each segment of the toolbar separately.  Explorer++ offered more toolbar icons that I was likely to find useful, including Back, Forward, and Up buttons.

Explorer++ did not offer the dual panel option.  But in recent weeks, I had not found myself using that option very often in FreeCommander.  I tended to prefer to keep my windows to half-screen width (using the half-screen snap available in Windows 7 via WinKey - left- (or right-) arrow), and a half-screen was too narrow for many filenames.  Moving from one tab to another was an easier way to work among multiple folders.  Explorer++ (unlike FreeCommander) further aided that by offering the option of bookmarking folders.  A bookmark would not create a new tab; it would change the focused folder in the already focused tab.

Unlike FreeCommander, Explorer++ offered the option of being treated as a replacement for WinEx.  This meant that my Start Menu icon (and other menu picks in various programs) that previously would have opened a Windows Explorer session were now opening an Explorer++ session instead.  That option was available via Tools > Options > General tab > Default File Manager.  I still had the option of opening Windows Explorer by typing "explorer" in a command box; hence, batch commands designed to open WinEx to a particular folder would still do so.

FreeCommander appeared to offer more command-line options.  The options in Explorer++ appeared to be limited to (a) the possibility of listing multiple directories to open when Explorer++ started up, each opening in its own tab and (b) the possibility of opening virtual folders by using their names (e.g., explorer++.exe "control panel").  I did not think I would need the latter.  The former would be useful only when dealing with relatively short pathnames; Windows might balk at a command listing several long paths.  I obtained information about these options by typing "explorer++.exe /?" at the command prompt.  That seemed to work only in the folder where explorer++.exe was located.

Other points of comparison:  Both Explorer++ and FreeCommander seemed to remember their window positions better than WinEx had done.  Even more so than FreeCommander, Explorer++ displayed much more information onscreen than WinEx:  51 rows, in my configuration.  Regrettably, unlike FreeCommander, the status bar in Explorer++ did not state both the number of items selected and the total number of items in the folder.  Like FreeCommander, Explorer++ did not offer an Undo option, in case I had accidentally moved or deleted the wrong file or folder.  Using Explorer++ or FreeCommander did not stop the annoying "This folder is shared with other people" messages.

As these remarks probably suggest, I found myself gravitating toward Explorer++ shortly after I began using FreeCommander in earnest as my WinEx replacement.  There would surely be many more contrasts between the two.  But I wasn't sure how many of them I would detect, since by this point it seemed that I would mostly just be using Explorer++.

Windows Explorer Has Stopped Working: FreeCommander and Other Alternatives to Windows Explorer

I was using Windows 7. I installed a new EVGA video card. Immediately, I began getting "Windows Explorer has stopped working" error messages, especially when I would right-click on a file or folder and try to move it somewhere else. A search led to a Microsoft webpage that identified the video driver as the first culprit. I had also had problems with the previous video card (also an EVGA), but had partially resolved those by rolling back to an earlier driver. That solution did not work this time. While awaiting EVGA's reply to a service request, I decided to look into Windows Explorer replacements.

This was not the first time I'd had problems with Windows Explorer. As far back as the late 1990s, I had found PowerDesk 98 to be a superior alternative to Windows Explorer in Windows 95 and 98. I had grown so attached to it that I was still occasionally looking, years later, to see whether they had come out with an update. It just offered a lot of features and advantages that I hadn't found in Windows Explorer.

To me and to at least some other users, Windows Explorer in Windows 7 had seemed like a step backwards from Windows Explorer under Windows XP. Some functionality was lost; some new problems appeared. For example, not long before this latest "stopped working" issue, I started getting the unwanted reminder that "This folder is shared with other people," which would come up when I tried to move or delete a folder. Despite some effort, I hadn't been able to get rid of that.

FreeCommander

In the past year or so, after repeated albeit superficial looks at various Windows Explorer alternatives, I had started using FreeCommander for some tasks. One thing pushing me in that direction was that, in Win7, Windows Explorer seemed eager to forget file selections. That is, I could go through a list of files and select some; but then Windows Explorer would de-select them if I (or anything else) changed the file list. In FreeCommander, unlike Windows Explorer, I could select files, and they would tend to stay selected -- even if I deleted one entry from the list (from within another program, for example, or another Windows Explorer session) or if I re-sorted the list by file size rather than file name. FreeCommander wasn't perfect about this. At this writing, a quick test revealed that it, too, would lose selections if I sorted by file type. Nonetheless, FreeCommander was much better than the current version of Windows Explorer in this regard, in my ordinary usage. FreeCommander was also not crashing, at present, during these instances when I was getting these "Windows Explorer has stopped working" messages.

FreeCommander also did a better job of putting me where I wanted to be. It would remember my last location, and would never put me in a pseudo-folder under Ray (my user name in the navigation pane), as Windows Explorer insisted on doing, when I actually wanted to be in Computer > Drive D > Folder X. I also liked that FreeCommander did not lard down my navigation pane with all sorts of Libraries and other top-level folders (which, to some degree, I had been able to eliminate from Windows Explorer by using registry tweaks).

On the downside, unlike Windows Explorer, FreeCommander did not preserve a memory of multiple sessions after a reboot. That is, if I had three Windows Explorer sessions and three FreeCommander sessions open before a crash, all focused on different folders, I would wind up with those same three Windows Explorer sessions after the crash, but only one FreeCommander session (or pair of sessions, if I was using FreeCommander's split-window feature). (I think I had to enable an option somewhere in Windows, or in a tweaking program, to get this functionality from Windows Explorer.) Then again, FreeCommander's option to open or close tabs (via View > New Folder Tab or else Ctrl-T and Ctrl-W) had the potential to make it unnecessary to have so many Windows Explorer sessions open at once.

At first, I did not realize that I could turn FreeCommander's split-window feature off. There were times when it was convenient to be able to view two separate lists of files -- from, say, two different drives -- within one FreeCommander session (and to split the screen either horizontally or vertically). The options to split the window or to view just the left or right sides were available through the menu (View > Split Window) or by shortcuts (Ctrl-Shift F1, F2, and F3). If I had multiple tabs open on one side, it would remember them, even if it was currently displaying only the other side.

I didn't like that FreeCommander wouldn't show me a full navigation tree (in the left-hand pane) for all drives: instead, it was focused on just one drive. To switch drives, I had to go to the top of the screen and select another drive from a list or combo box (configurable via Extras > Settings > View > Drives). That seemed inconvenient, and that top bar took up screen space. One workaround might be to have a different tab open for each drive, and just navigate within that tab whenever I wanted to work in a different drive.

I had some batch files that would open various Windows Explorer sessions automatically, on certain dates or at certain times of day. There was a simple command format to specify which folder a Windows Explorer session should display: start explorer.exe /e,"D:\Folder Name\File Name.doc." I wondered if I could do something similar with FreeCommander. It would let me specify a pair of starting folders (via Extras > Settings > Start Program), but could I go further than that? It appeared that, to match what I was doing with Windows Explorer in this regard, I would have to set up a relatively complicated arrangement with alternative .ini files in FreeCommander. (I wasn't entirely sure whether this was what the program's author meant when he said that "several layouts can be saved.") I probably wouldn't go to that trouble for the most part, though I could imagine setting up a couple of really complicated sets of tabs and linking to them with shortcuts on my semi-portable customized Start Menu.

One feature of FreeCommander that I liked immediately was its more condensed display. Windows Explorer had seemed to add more space between lines, going from Windows XP to Windows 7. I wasn't sure why. The result was that Windows Explorer would display 38 items at a time (or a few more, if the top menu and bottom status bar were turned off) while FreeCommander would display 45 -- and those 45 would be presented in a larger, more readable font. FreeCommander's status bar was also more informative, telling me that I had selected 45 out of 110 items within a folder, and such information would remain visible in the status bar, whereas for some reason Windows Explorer would sometimes replace it with the date when a folder was created.

One thing I didn't like about the FreeCommander interface was that it didn't have an address bar into which I could paste an address for a quick switch to a different directory. In FreeCommander, I had to use the Edit menu to get a folder's address for pasting elsewhere, and the Folder > Go to Folder menu pick to paste an address from elsewhere into FreeCommander. These steps were inconvenient because (a) they required more steps and (b) they were in two different locations, which made things a little more confusing. On the other hand, FreeCommander offered the option (via Alt-Ins or Edit > Copy Full Name as Text) of copying both the path and the file name in one step, which Windows Explorer did not do.

I felt that FreeCommander needed some reorganization and clarification. There was apparently a new XE version in the works; it appeared that the present version dated from 2009. On the other hand, I wasn't sure how much I could complain about the program's offerings. Quite aside from the fact that it was free, FreeCommander had all kinds of features not available in Windows Explorer, and there didn't seem to be much that WinEx could do that FreeCommander couldn't. I figured that, with or without reorganization, I would become familiar with FreeCommander's menus and possibilities if I began using it more extensively.

One particular area that I did not explore, within FreeCommander, was its offering of various built-in utilities. These included file viewing (e.g., hex, image, binary formats), zipping, searching, wiping, checksums, listing, renaming, and splitting; multiple file renaming; directory comparison and synchronization; and the option to add more tools to the list. I didn't look into this because I was not sure how much I would use these tools. As indicated in other posts in this blog, a lot of problems and questions could arise when you really got into the details of these sorts of functions. For example, I had paid some attention, in recent years, to GoodSync and alternatives for synchronization between computers, and to Beyond Compare and rsync for comparing a computer's files against backups. I was hesitant to replace those sorts of dedicated tools with what might be a simplistic form of file comparison that could make a mess.

In terms of other conveniences, there was quite a list of hotkeys. FreeCommander was available in both installed and portable versions. There were user forums with a total of maybe 10,000 posts. It was definitely a stable and worthy program. Given my previous searches and my experiences to date with FreeCommander, the question for me at this point was whether there was some other Windows Explorer alternative that was even better.

Other Windows Explorer Alternatives

Along with various ways to customize Windows Explorer (which did not presently appeal to me, given the fact that it was crashing every time I looked at it sideways), there were various lists of Windows Explorer alternatives. For example, a PCTIPS 3000 webpage briefly listed FreeCommander as one of the best (free) Windows Explorer replacements, along with Q-Dir, Explorer XP, NexusFile, and CubicExplorer.

A potentially manipulable poll suggested that users of one forum were using Total Commander, Directory Opus, XYplorer, Explorer++, Q-Dir, and FreeCommander, in approximately that (descending) order. A SuperUser thread ranked the leading Windows Explorer alternatives as being (in this order) Total Commander, QTTabBar, FreeCommander, FarManager, XYplorer, Directory Opus, the command line, xyplorer2 (?), Q-Dir, TeraCopy (!), CubicExplorer, SpeedCommander, Altap Salamander, Xplorer2, muCommander, and others recommended by at least one person. Another webpage listed at least 30 free and paid alternatives to Windows Explorer. TechRepublic listed these as its preferred free Windows Explorer replacements: CubicExplorer, Explorer++, Xplorer2, NexusFile, and Q-Dir.

Wikipedia provided a comparison of many such programs. It appeared that they could first be divided into free and nonfree categories. Since I was not likely to pay for something that FreeCommander (not to mention Windows Explorer) could already do for free, I focused on the free ones. This removed Total Commander ($40) from consideration -- a perennial favorite that I had tried briefly but hadn't found that terribly impressive. The nonfree group also included some other popular entries from the lists cited above: Directory Opus ($85!), XYplorer ($43), SpeedCommander (~$55), Xplorer2 ($30), and Salamander ($30) -- assuming the lite versions available for some of these programs would fail to match a competitive freeware alternative like FreeCommander. It was not clear how recently the Wikipedia page had been updated -- it didn't include any reference to some of the programs listed above, and therefore might not reflect pricing changes (including decisions to offer a given program for free, or to stop doing so). Then again, I guessed that any developer who was on top of the game would know of this Wikipedia page and would be updating the pricing information pretty quickly.

ExplorerXP did not appear to have been updated for Windows 7. I had encountered other programs, great in Windows XP, that had stumbled at one point or another in Win7. Given the number of competing programs, I tentatively ruled out those that were not clearly Windows 7 compatible. I was also inclined to exclude those whose screenshots provided a clunky interface and/or limited information -- notably, Far Manager.

The leading free Windows Explorer alternatives, other than FreeCommander, thus appeared to include Q-Dir, NexusFile, CubicExplorer, Explorer++, QTTabBar, and muCommander. The Wikipedia comparison page provided a table indicating the kinds of views that each such program offered. I considered a Details view option essential. Evidently no such view was available in CubicExplorer. I was not sure if a twin-panel or tab options were essential, but CubicExplorer seemed to lack those features too. As noted above, I was not especially interested in the utilities (e.g., file compression) that such programs might offer, so I did not examine the Wikipedia tables on those matters.

I looked at the webpages for the ones that remained on my list: Q-Dir, NexusFile, Explorer++, QTTabBar, and muCommander. I had previously glanced at QTTabBar but, for reasons I did not recall, had not gone far with it. On this review, I was not too impressed. Its forums seemed to be lonely places; there was an indication that it was still in "public beta"; and there were remarks of instability and Windows 7 incompatibility.

Q-Dir's screenshots seemed to offer the potential to divide up the screen in a number of interesting ways. They did not seem to display a tabbed browsing option, but I gathered that tabbing was an option somehow. There did not appear to be a forum, but the author did provide an array of FAQs, with perhaps some English-language limitations. My principal reaction at this point was that, having glanced ahead at Explorer++, I thought it might be a little more of what I was looking for.

NexusFile had a snazzy webpage, especially for people who like black, but I wasn't so sure about its content. Forum posts didn't seem to be categorized, and there didn't seem to be a way of searching them. Generally, as with most of the other programs noted here, the information provided on the webpages did not seem responsive to the detailed concerns noted in my review of FreeCommander (above). That might have been alleviated in some cases if I had plunged into their FAQs in detail. It would not have been alleviated in the case of NexusFile, whose FAQs page had a total of six questions.

Between muCommander and Explorer++, a comparison of forum posts suggested that muCommander was more of a cross-platform option, with many of its posts coming from Linux users. There also seemed to be somewhat more recent activity in the Explorer++ forums. MuCommander, not listed on the Wikipedia comparison page (above) at this point, apparently did not yet have tab support. Between the two, then, I was inclined toward Explorer++.

The thing is, I wasn't seeing anything in any of these alternatives that FreeCommander lacked. At present, the best course of action seemed to be to focus on FreeCommander, to the extent that it performed more stably and functionally than Windows Explorer. I decided that I would return to these alternatives if, at some point, neither Windows Explorer nor FreeCommander seemed to be working well for me.

Suggestion

It seemed, in particular, that while these various programs were trying to compete to be the best Swiss Army knife, doing everything fairly well, there might actually be some merit in taking more of a niche approach. For example, I tended to use a few folders very frequently. I had not really worked out the whole thing of using Favorites, links, Send To, Move To, Copy To, and other ways of moving and sorting my attention, or my files, among these key folders. It would have been very helpful if, for instance, I could have just punched a function key or other hotkey to move a file to any of a number of previously designated folders. I often found myself sorting files; this would have been very useful.

In that particular example -- and that was obviously not the only specialized way in which people might use Windows Explorer -- there seemed to be a lot of room for people to develop tools that would help me navigate across my computer adequately, while providing a really special experience among key locations. In that case, I could easily imagine running this other program along with (not "instead of") Windows Explorer or FreeCommander.

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.

Windows 7: Improving Command Window

I was looking for advice on how to edit the Windows 7 registry to make permanent changes to the command window (cmd.exe).  I went into its Properties and made changes (to e.g., the colors and fonts), and I added parameters to the command line that would open a command box (saved in e.g., a desktop shortcut).  I wasn't seeing clear advice on how to edit the registry to make those changes permanent -- assuming that such a registry edit was possible.

During this search, I ran across a reference to Console.  The purpose of this program was apparently just to make the command window (or PowerShell, or other command interface) more adjustable and appealing.  Console version 2.0 (confusingly cited by some as Console2) appeared to have drawn a few positive reviews.  I downloaded and ran the portable version 2.00b (beta).  In its menu, I went into View, where Tabs and Status Bar were the only items I left checked.  (The others were available by right-clicking anywhere in the Console window.)  Then, adjusting some advice in light of Console Help (i.e., console.chm in the portable program's folder), went into its Edit > Settings and did the following:

• Console:  Startup dir:  set to my working folder, D:\Current.  Window size:  80 rows, 80 columns, save on exit.  Buffer size:  1000 rows, 0 columns.  Save settings to user directory:  not checked, since I wanted the settings to be saved to the folder where they were loaded (i.e., the customized Start Menu folder that would persist even if I had to reinstall Windows).  Console colors map:  click on the black box next to the black square and change everything that would have been black to be white (or whatever) instead.
• Appearance:  Font:  Consolas size 11, bold, Clear Type smoothing, Custom color.  Position:  docking:  none.  Snap to desktop edges:  off.
• Hotkeys:  New Tab 1 = Ctrl-T.  (Actually hit Ctrl-T and then click Assign.)  Copy Selection = Ctrl-C.  Paste = Ctrl-V.  Mouse:  Select text:  Left.

I created a shortcut to Console.exe.  I put one copy of that link in the Start Menu.  On reboot, it functioned as desired.

I let some time pass.  As it turned out, my changes to the Windows 7 command window proved to be permanent, even without registry edits.  And I liked it as it was.  I was not actually using Console.  It wa an option to remain aware of, but it appeared unnecessary for my purposes at present.

Windows Seven Forums: Banned!

I was trying to get an answer to a question about Windows 7.  I went to Windows SevenForums.com.  When I tried to log in, I got this message:

You have been banned for the following reason:
spam
Date the ban will be lifted: Never

I had gotten that message previously, and had twice asked them why I was getting this.  They had never replied.

As one comedian put it, "It's funny, I haven't even done anything yet. How did they know that I'm going to spam?"  The answer seemed to involve backlinking.  I was not entirely sure what that was, and therefore could not say whether I had ever done it -- though it seemed unlikely, since I had only posted one message on their forum -- a message that I could not now examine, to see how it might have erred.

This time, when I tried to use their contact form to ask them what was going on, they just kept giving me one Captcha after another.  Some of them were really hard to figure out, so I had to click on the recycle button to get a different one.  I didn't realize they might just be playing games until I got this one:

It did seem unlikely that SevenForums.com seriously expected me to enter or translate that bit of Hebrew.

I concluded, at this point, that my only remedy was to put this item out there for the world to see, so that perhaps someone with some way of getting through to SevenForums.com might be able to persuade them to smell the coffee.

Windows 7: Cannot Create New Folder in Windows Explorer

I was working along in Windows 7 x64, when suddenly I discovered that I could not create a folder in Windows Explorer.  The method I usually used (File > New > Folder) no longer existed:  the Folder option was gone from the drop-down menu.

A search suggested that I was not the only one who had experienced this.  It seemed that suggested solutions had not reliably fixed the problem.  One such solution was to download and run a REG file, and then reboot, to correct a problem in the registry.  I was concerned that such files could make a large number of registry changes, though, with unpredictable consequences, and that not all of those changes might be applicable to all versions of Windows 7.  A more conservative option was to add just one line to the registry, in a sub-subkey that might or might not already be present.  Specifically, the Default value of HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\Directory\Background\shellex\ContextMenuHandlers\New was supposed to be {D969A300-E7FF-11d0-A93B-00A0C90F2719}.  But mine already was.  So the conservative registry edit wasn't the answer.

Someone had said something about creating a new folder by using the right-click context menu in Windows Explorer.  I had rarely if ever used that approach; and now that I tried it, I saw that the only New thing I could create there was a Briefcase, that holdover from ye olde versions of Windows.  I had often used Ctrl+Shft+N to create new folders, but that wasn't working either.  I ran a search to see if there were other ways to create a new folder, at least to buy some time until maybe a solution would occur to me.  One suggestion was to click on the new folder icon on the taskbar.  I didn't have that, I hadn't seen it, and pinning Windows Explorer to the taskbar didn't create it.  I suspected that perhaps the writer meant "command bar" (i.e., near the top of the Windows Explorer window), not the taskbar.  I did still have a New Folder option up there, but it wasn't working.  It seemed that the basic functionality was gone, regardless of where it might have been available previously.

It took me a while to realize that, of course, I could still create folders by opening a command window and using the "md" command.  Example:  md "\Folder name" -- where quotation marks were necessary because the folder's name had a space in it.  The hard way to open a command window in the folder where I wanted to create a subfolder was to go to Start > Run > cmd, and then navigate to the correct place by using commands like C: or D: to change drives, and cd "\Folder name\Subfolder name" to get where I wanted to go.  The easy way to open a command window in any folder was to go into Ultimate Windows Tweaker > Additional Tweaks > Show "Open Command Window Here."

But back to the missing ways of creating a new folder within Windows Explorer.  There were the inevitable suggestions to search for malware; but I wasn't getting any other weirdness, so malware seemed unlikely.  One discussion brought to mind the possibility that a recent program installation was responsible.  I played around with uninstalling and rebooting, but nothing clear emerged.  It seemed that I would have to restore Windows from a previous version, install upgrades and new programs as needed or desired, and see if I could track more closely when (or if) the problem reappeared.  But before doing that, I went ahead and ran the REG file mentioned above, the one that made many registry changes.  But when I did, I got an error:

Registry Editor

Cannot import D:\Current\NewFolderFix.reg:  Not all data was successfully written to the registry.  Some keys are open by the system or other processes.

I closed all windows that were still open, right-clicked on various icons down in the system tray and closed those, and tried again.  Still no luck.  I went to Start > Run > taskmgr.exe > Processes tab, closed down some processes that looked safe, and tried again.  It still wasn't enough.  I rebooted into Safe Mode and tried running the REG file there.  Same error!  I ran a search for the error message, but found no solution in the several pages I examined.  One hypothesis:  the REG file was not suited for this particular machine and/or version of Windows.

Eventually I did figure out what caused the no-new-folders problem.  It was a program called Boot Deleter.  It had a nifty option to associate itself with Windows Explorer, so that I could just right-click on a file that resisted being deleted by other means, and indicate that I wanted that file to be deleted the next time the system rebooted.  But now that I was watching carefully, the ability to create a new folder disappeared as soon as I clicked on the Associate button.  No real surprise that it would be problematic:  the program had not been updated since 2005.  I clicked, now, on the button to kill the association, but that didn't solve the problem:  the ability to create a new folder was not restored, even after a reboot.

Due to an apparent malfunction or misconfiguration, I discovered at this point that System Restore was not keeping current backups.  So now I would apparently have to restore a drive image from more than a month earlier.  Not a terrible thing, but I wondered if there was another way.  I hadn't used Revo Uninstaller, to watch what was being done when Boot Deleter was installed.  Boot Deleter hadn't installed a desktop icon or otherwise been visible, so I couldn't use Revo's Hunter Mode to figure out the problem.  But I could try reinstalling Boot Deleter, with Revo running, and see if it would work now.  I saw, then, that I would need the pro version of Revo for this, and I wasn't ready to spring for that.

Another possibility was to use Process Monitor (PM), which was said to track attempts to modify the registry.  I opened PM, maximized it, spread out its columns so that I could see what was happening, and went up to its toolbar.  I hovered over items to get their tooltips.  At the right end of the toolbar, I turned off a couple of items, so that I was monitoring only file and registry activity.  I went to Boot Deleter and got ready to install it again.  Back at the PM toolbar, I clicked on the Clear button, so that I wouldn't have too long a history to work through.  (I could also have used Ctrl-X to clear.)  Then I went back to Boot Deleter and installed it.  Then, back at PM, I clicked on the Capture button (Ctrl-E).  Then the Filter button (Ctrl-L).  In the Process Monitor Filter dialog, I deselected all of the items listed (e.g., "Process Name is Procmon.exe ... Exclude.").  In the first drop-down box at the top, I selected Process Name.  The second box said "is."  In the third drop-down box, I selected BootDeleter.exe.  The fourth box said "Include."  I clicked Add.  This put my BootDeleter.exe item in the list as the only checked item.  I clicked Apply > OK.  The status bar at the bottom of the PM screen told me that I now had a list of 2,345 events.  I went to File > Save.  "Events displayed using current filter" was already selected.  I changed the format to CSV and specified an output path and CSV filetype > OK.  In Windows Explorer, I double-clicked on that resulting file ("Process Monitor 01.csv"), and manipulated the file in Excel.  Basically, I filtered it for the items that looked like file or registry changes that would need to be reversed.  I wound up with a list of several hundred items.  Clearly, this was not going to be a matter of a few registry keys needing to be undone.  I decided it would be easier to restore the previous image, and catch up to the present that way.

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