Guide to Create a multi-boot rescue USB flash drive.

This guide is a must read for all those people that could be asked to help fix a PC at any moment in your life. This guide helps you create a multi boot rescue USB Flash drive which when booted lets you pick from.

I would like to thank Si for writing such a great guide, it is a real treat for anyone whose willing to create a multi-boot rescue USB file drive.

Useful Tools:

SystemRescueCD
System RescueCD is an amazing Linux live environment which has a large array of rescue tools.

Windows PE 2.0
Windows PE 2.0 is a live Windows environment, comes in handy for portable CHKDSK’ing.

Darik’s Boot and Nuke
Darik’s Boot and Nuke is used for wiping disks.

ntpasswd
ntpasswd is a must have, it recovers Windows systems from forgotten passwords.

Memtest86+
As most of you guys know, Memtest86+ lets you check for broken RAM in your PC.

Let’s discuss the steps that you need to create a multi-boot rescue USB Flash drive.

1- Gather Softwares / Tools mentioned below:

PeToUSB
GRUB4DOS installer grubinst
SystemRescueCD
Windows AIK

After you have downloaded those tools, it’s time to move to step 2 which is preparing the USB drive.

2: Prepare the USB drive

The first thing to do is plug your USB drive into your machine, and start PeToUSB (Run as Administrator under Vista). Tick the boxes:

Enable Disk Format
Quick Format (OK this is optional)
Force Volume Dismount

Now hit Start and wait for the process to finish.

If your drive is larger than 2GB you will encounter an error here. This is because PeToUSB tries to format the drive to FAT, which has a maximum of 2GB. The error is not a problem because the drive has been made bootable regardless. Simply head over to Windows Explorer and format it to FAT32 as normal.

Next, we’re on to grubinst. Again, run this as Administrator if you’re using Vista. Select the Disk option, then pick your flash drive from the list. You will have to make an educated guess as to which one it is as all your disks will be listed. If you’ve only got one flash drive connected it will normally be the bottom one. Leave everything else untouched and hit the install button.

Now, copy the grldr file from your GRUB4DOS folder onto the root of the flash drive. That’s the disk ready to go.

3: Installing SystemRescueCD and the floppy images

DBAN, ntpasswd and Memtest86+ are all included with the SystemRescueCD package. Extract the contents of your SystemRescueCD ISO to a folder on your PC, then copy the following files to the root of your flash drive:

dban.img
initram.igz
memdisk
memtestp.img
ntpass.img
rescuecd
sysrcd.dat

That’s as hard as it gets to install those.

4: Create a Windows PE 2.0 installation and copy it to the flash drive

Follow this guide “Windows PE 2.0“, using the WAIK you already downloaded, up to the point where you have your ISO file ready to burn to CD:

Now you have your ISO, simply extract the following from it onto the root of your flash drive (including subfolders):

boot
EFI
sources
bootmgr

5: Configure GRUB and we’re done

You now need to create a menu.lst file in the root of your flash drive with a text editor (like notepad), and paste in the following text:

color black/cyan yellow/cyan
timeout 60

title SystemRescueCD
kernel /rescuecd initrd=initram.igz video=ofonly vga=0 scandelay=5
initrd /initram.igz

title Windows PE
chainloader /bootmgr

title DBAN
kernel /memdisk
initrd /dban.img

title ntpasswd
kernel /memdisk
initrd /ntpass.img

title Memtest86
kernel /memdisk
initrd /memtestp.img

You should now be able to reboot, select the flash drive as your boot device in your BIOS, and be ready to go!

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