How To Create A Bootable Usb Toolkit
Many technicians, engineers power users and more have a plethora of tools that they like to use during their day-to-day activities. Many of these also provide (or require) booting into the tool rather than Windows. Memtest, Drive Fitness Test, Drive cloning utilities, etc all revolve around the idea of booting into their own custom environment. Usually, they are burned to a CD and then the computer boots off that CD - but after a while that can add up to quite the stack, and who wants to lug 50 CDs around with them everywhere they go!?
USB flash drives can be used in the same way as CDs for these tools given the right preparation, the major difference being that the USB drive can hold all your tools on one single device. This is known as a Multiboot USB or Bootable USB Toolkit. Here's how you go about setting one up:
USB Prep Tools
As noted, you need to prepare the USB drive to make it bootable. We do this by installing the GRUB bootloader onto the drive. GRUB (or, more accurately GRUB-legacy) is the defacto bootloader for Linux systems, and is highly versatile.
First, download the GRUB installer, and extract it's contents. Within the grubinst folder it generates open the grubinst_gui.exe application. From here select Disk and then the proper disk for your USB drive. Be sure to choose the right drive, choosing the wrong drive CAN and WILL erase your entire hard drive! If you need to determine which one is your USB drive, right click on My Computer and select Manage. From there select Disk Management, your USB drive should appear with the proper Disk Number labelled clearly.
The default options within the GUI are fine, just click install and then proceed. We're done with the preparation, wasn't that easy?
Add Your Tools to the Drive
After the drive is properly formatted, add your tools in the .ISO format to the USB drive. That is, copy the .ISO image you would normally burn to a CD onto the drive itself. It does not matter where they go - so if you like to organize a bit feel free to add folders and sub folders - you just need to know the absolute paths to the .ISO file for the next step.
Here are some excellent free utilities that I commonly use:
Memtest - The great staple of memory tests. This tool actively inspects every bit of RAM in your system to test for errors. Grab it here.
Drive Fitness Test - While this is traditionally Hitachi's tool for testing their hard drives, it will work with any hard drive at all. Be advised: If you use RAID/AHCI you'll need to disable that and put your controller into IDE mode for this to work. This will not break your RAID so long as you don't do any writing to either disk while it is out of RAID mode. This will also not harm a Windows installation on AHCI enabled single drive setups, Windows will simply fail to boot until AHCI mode is enabled. DFT can be found here.
Seatools - Much the same as DFT, but specifically for Seagate drive. This will give you Seagate specific fault codes for RMA purposes should the drive fail the test. The same advisory for RAID/AHCI setups applies here to. Seatools is found here - grab the DOS version.
Dban - Dban is a simple utility to wipe drives clean - for whatever reason you may have. Be careful - this is a VERY powerful tool. Pick it up here.
NT Offline Password Reset - A command line utility to reset the password on Windows machines. Very handy if you ever forget your password or if a friend does. Similarly useful if you receive a system and don't have logon access. This works with Windows 2000-XP flawlessly, results may vary with Windows 7. Grab it here.
Your Favorite Linux Distro - That's right, you can carry around a full blown Linux Distro on your key chain - but you probably already knew that. I don't need to explain how useful this is, and any distro should work. In my technician days I found Puppy Linux to be very useful due to it's compact size and speed.
There are, of course, dozens of other tools that are available in .ISO format that can be used - and if you know what you're doing in GRUB you can even get non .ISO tools booting just fine, including full on Windows installers - but that's well beyond the scope of this how to.
Tie It All Together
Now that you have all your tools on your drive, it's time to be able to use them - after all GRUB needs to know where they are located (remember that absolute path to the .ISOs?) and how to load them. Create a text file called menu.lst on the root of the flash drive, make sure it isn't called menu.lst.txt.
Open it in notepad, and use the following templates:
The above is a very basic example, but the Memtest template can be used for a lot of .ISO's. If you are having trouble, search Google. GRUB is very easy to learn.
That's it! Now boot to your USB drive and enjoy not having to account for dozens of CDs anymore. Get creative, see what you can get working. Like I said, with enough know-how and determination you can get things like Windows installers, and the very old ERD Commander toolset working like this - very handy for any technician!
USB flash drives can be used in the same way as CDs for these tools given the right preparation, the major difference being that the USB drive can hold all your tools on one single device. This is known as a Multiboot USB or Bootable USB Toolkit. Here's how you go about setting one up:
USB Prep Tools
As noted, you need to prepare the USB drive to make it bootable. We do this by installing the GRUB bootloader onto the drive. GRUB (or, more accurately GRUB-legacy) is the defacto bootloader for Linux systems, and is highly versatile.
First, download the GRUB installer, and extract it's contents. Within the grubinst folder it generates open the grubinst_gui.exe application. From here select Disk and then the proper disk for your USB drive. Be sure to choose the right drive, choosing the wrong drive CAN and WILL erase your entire hard drive! If you need to determine which one is your USB drive, right click on My Computer and select Manage. From there select Disk Management, your USB drive should appear with the proper Disk Number labelled clearly.
The default options within the GUI are fine, just click install and then proceed. We're done with the preparation, wasn't that easy?
Add Your Tools to the Drive
After the drive is properly formatted, add your tools in the .ISO format to the USB drive. That is, copy the .ISO image you would normally burn to a CD onto the drive itself. It does not matter where they go - so if you like to organize a bit feel free to add folders and sub folders - you just need to know the absolute paths to the .ISO file for the next step.
Here are some excellent free utilities that I commonly use:
Memtest - The great staple of memory tests. This tool actively inspects every bit of RAM in your system to test for errors. Grab it here.
Drive Fitness Test - While this is traditionally Hitachi's tool for testing their hard drives, it will work with any hard drive at all. Be advised: If you use RAID/AHCI you'll need to disable that and put your controller into IDE mode for this to work. This will not break your RAID so long as you don't do any writing to either disk while it is out of RAID mode. This will also not harm a Windows installation on AHCI enabled single drive setups, Windows will simply fail to boot until AHCI mode is enabled. DFT can be found here.
Seatools - Much the same as DFT, but specifically for Seagate drive. This will give you Seagate specific fault codes for RMA purposes should the drive fail the test. The same advisory for RAID/AHCI setups applies here to. Seatools is found here - grab the DOS version.
Dban - Dban is a simple utility to wipe drives clean - for whatever reason you may have. Be careful - this is a VERY powerful tool. Pick it up here.
NT Offline Password Reset - A command line utility to reset the password on Windows machines. Very handy if you ever forget your password or if a friend does. Similarly useful if you receive a system and don't have logon access. This works with Windows 2000-XP flawlessly, results may vary with Windows 7. Grab it here.
Your Favorite Linux Distro - That's right, you can carry around a full blown Linux Distro on your key chain - but you probably already knew that. I don't need to explain how useful this is, and any distro should work. In my technician days I found Puppy Linux to be very useful due to it's compact size and speed.
There are, of course, dozens of other tools that are available in .ISO format that can be used - and if you know what you're doing in GRUB you can even get non .ISO tools booting just fine, including full on Windows installers - but that's well beyond the scope of this how to.
Tie It All Together
Now that you have all your tools on your drive, it's time to be able to use them - after all GRUB needs to know where they are located (remember that absolute path to the .ISOs?) and how to load them. Create a text file called menu.lst on the root of the flash drive, make sure it isn't called menu.lst.txt.
Open it in notepad, and use the following templates:
Code:
splashimage /bgimage/yourimage.xpm.gz ## This tells GRUB what image to use as a background splash screen when you boot to the drive
color blue/black yellow/blue ## Text color and highlight colors
timeout 120 ## Time limit until the first option is automatically choosen
title Boot Main Hard Drive ## Title is self-explanatory, use this to boot to your primary hard drive, probably your OS drive.
root (hd0,0) ## Set the root partition, in this case the first partition of the first hard drive.
chainloader +1 ## Tells GRUB to hand off control to the partition's boot loader - probably Windows'.
boot ## Boot off the selected partition, using the default boot loader.
title Memtest
find --set-root /tools/memtest.iso ## Find the .ISO file in /tools/ (that is the tools folder on the root of the drive) and set it as root
map --mem /tools/memtest.iso (0xff) ## Using this and the below, once booted you can remove the flash drive as the tool is running in memory
map --hook
root (0xff) ## Set root
boot ## Boot memtest
The above is a very basic example, but the Memtest template can be used for a lot of .ISO's. If you are having trouble, search Google. GRUB is very easy to learn.
That's it! Now boot to your USB drive and enjoy not having to account for dozens of CDs anymore. Get creative, see what you can get working. Like I said, with enough know-how and determination you can get things like Windows installers, and the very old ERD Commander toolset working like this - very handy for any technician!
Would you consider a companion article about adopting the same method for network booting?