Comments on: Running Hiren’s BootCD from hard drive

By: admin

admin — Mon, 11 Apr 2011 06:30:46 +0000

Hi. I just make some update to this post. Please refer to the easier method and tell me how it fares.

By: Anand

Anand — Wed, 06 Apr 2011 10:54:14 +0000

Great article and something i am looking for.

I have a problem. I have an old office pc which is severely infected and contains lot of imp docs. It is old with only 256mb ram and the virus doesn’t let me use either MSE or MBAM. I tried to boot hiren 11.3 from CD but for some reason my cd drive doesnt recognize it. So i am trying to boot it from hard drive. My C drive is fat32 and tried the steps but it didn’t work. What am i doing wrong?

By: tw

tw — Tue, 18 Jan 2011 02:21:21 +0000

Yes. You can. The best way now seems to be looking into the HBCD directory of the latest Hiren BootCD. Just copy the menu.lst inside that folder, the grldr and grub.exe to your specified location. Make changes to menu.lst and boot.ini if necessary (in your case it is d:grldr). It is easier than the method in the origianl post.

By: alprie

alprie — Sat, 15 Jan 2011 10:09:53 +0000

what if your fat32 at d:

can i change c:gldtr >>>> d:gldtr

cause my c os were nfts

By: Neokleon

Neokleon — Mon, 08 Nov 2010 11:00:53 +0000

Thanks, dear it worked like charm..
I do this:

Format drive to FAT32,
set it active,
extracted GRLDR,
grub.exe
and MENU.lst
bootlace.com

from grub4dos v0.4.4.

Inserted your this code at the end of MENU.lst.
=======================================
timeout 30
default 0

title Start Hiren’s BootCD
find –set-root /HBCD/boot.gz
map –mem /HBCD/boot.gz (fd0)
map –hook
chainloader (fd0)+1
rootnoverify (fd0)
map –floppies=1
boot

title Mini Windows Xp
find –set-root /HBCD/XPLOADER.BIN
chainloader /HBCD/XPLOADER.BIN
=======================================

Then Copy these files to C:
NTLDR
AUTOEXEC.BAT
BOOT.INI
CONFIG.SYS
NTDETECT.COM

Then open BOOT.INI and writ these lines at the end
=============
C:GRLDR=”Hiren”
=============

Save it.

then Extracted HBCD folder from the Hiren’s 10.4 ISO to the drive root.

Finally restart the system and it boots….
Hurray

By: phishybongwaters

phishybongwaters — Fri, 05 Nov 2010 13:14:14 +0000

For this guide to work you have to remember a few things. First, it has to be FAT32, which limits the size you can create the partition, I’d suggest using something like partitionmagic as it will tell you exactly how big your partition can be and still be bootable. If you just take, say, and 80 gig or bigger drive and format to fat32 it won’t be bootable, you only have a few gigs to work with, plenty of space for XP.

I suggest you use parition magic, create an active primary parition formatted as fat32 with the most space you can and still have it bootable (partition magic will tell you when you specify the size)

Then install windows XP as normal to that partition, once it’s done and working (reboot to be sure) follow the steps of extracting the grub files to the root of c:. EDIT the menu.lst file so it looks exactly like the one above (meaning you can delete everything in there with notepad and copy and paste from the given example.)

Then, i suggest instead of trying to edit boot.ini directly (which you can’t) :

right click “my computer” properties
click ‘advanced’ tab
Click startup and recovery “settings” button

Click the edit button beside “to edit startup options manuall”
Then ADD (C:GRLDR=”Hiren”) into the file above the line that should be there for your current windows install.

Then copy the HBCD folder over to the root of C: and reboot, done.

If ALL you want is hirens, you can follow the same steps, then manually remove the windows install files from either a boot cd (hirens you just installed) or a pe environment, making sure to LEAVE the boot files. Obviously if you attempt to load xp it will error, but as long as the drive is bootable, boot.ini is there, and grub is intact, it should work.

By: Javier

Javier — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 20:37:45 +0000

I’m having the same issue as pabloroy. I have a 320 Gb USB Drive.
2 Partitions – (#1: 512 Mb Fat32 || #2: 300 Gb NTFS)
Got Hiren’s running from the 512 Mb Fat32 partition.
When I try to run Norton Ghost I get the “HBCD” folder not found error.
Any suggestion is appreciated.

Thank you very much guys!

By: thinkweird

thinkweird — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 02:08:06 +0000

Hi Guillaume,

Thank you very much for your detailed feedback. I am sure it will help a lot for future visitors who have the same problem.
Hopefully I can find enough time in the near future to polish this post based on the discussions so far.

By: Guillaume

Guillaume — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 22:25:28 +0000

Oops, I forgot a third key need for this to work. I had to set both machines in bios to “Legacy USB” = Enabled. So the sticks are both running on USB 1.1 even though they are USB 2.0 sticks. Weird, must be one of the drivers he used can’t do USB 2.

Also, if you have an old machine that can’t select the boot drive at startup, then don’t even try. i can pretty well guarantee it won’t work. I’ve just donw another test with both sticks AND a USB DVD writer with the Hirens CD plugged in to the netbook. Its offering me all 3 as a boot source. First I had no Hirens, now its coming at me from all sides.

This is amazing. Thanks again thinkweird!

By: Guillaume

Guillaume — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 22:12:50 +0000

Yes! Thanks guys. I now have two USB sticks that have Hirens 10.2 and my XP Pro i386 folder, and they work. The two sticks are both old 1 Gig items I used to lend out (but I won’t any more). One is a no-name cheapo Chinese, the other is am old Buffalo stick.

I’ve tried so many times over the last 3 years to get this to work, but always failed. This article got me to try again. I’m not good at editing config or menu files, and it turns out that I didn’t need to.

All I did was follow this to the letter:
http://www.hiren.info/pages/bootcd-on-usb-disk.
I downloaded the two sets of files, formatted both sticks in FAT32, ran the grub4dos, then copied the HBCD folder to both from a CD. Then copied grdldr amd menu.lst from the HBCD folder to root of the sticks. I made no other changes.

Ar first it didn’t work – blinking cursor or garbage on the screen when I selected the standard boot. Then I tried the ‘Alternative Boot Method’ in the menu, exactly as your script does thinkweird, except I did it manually by scrolling down. Yup, bingo!

Tested on both my machines.
Machine 1: A homebrew P45 Intel chipset board, way overclocked, but otherwise untouched. One 500 Gig SATA, one 320 Gig IDE. NTFS and Fat32 partitions.
Machine 2: A cheapo N260 netbook with a 320 Gig IDE internal.
The 2 keys seem to be a) that I had to manually select the stick as boot (bios F10 on mine) Neither machine booted with USB stick set as first boot priority. b) The Alternative boot method on the Hirens menu MUST be used to run the tools. Standard method does not work.