Hirens and UEFI

[Compton]

I think you can create a create UEFI bootable USB using rufus

but you said you try that already

did you zero out the flash drive and rewrite the iso with image usb

[SteveSi]

When Hirens XP boots, it looks for a drive that contains the Hirens files and folders and adds them to the Desktop via a script that executes when the Desktop loads. If the extra Desktop icons are not displaying then it means it cannot 'see' the source drive.
Are you connecting the USB drive to a USB 3.0 port by any chance?

[markinhfx]

(03-18-2015, 01:31 PM)Compton Wrote:  I think you can create a create UEFI bootable USB using rufus

but you said you try that already

did you zero out the flash drive and rewrite the iso with image usb

SUCCESS!

However not in a way I expected, I did zero out the drive remake the boot disk etc. and nothing changed. However before re-starting Windows I decided on a hunch to try my boot disk in my USB 2.0 port. My laptop has two USB 3.0 ports and one USB 2.0 port which I had my Logitech cordless receiver plugged into. I removed that and was able to boot the thumb drive properly. Also I noticed upon doing this that when it did boot into HIRENS the only port that would recognize an external drive was the USB 2.0 port. I have been able to boot things like parted Magic and have the other ports work so this is obviously some sort of limitation of HIRENS.
I will post below pictures of what the BIOS setup looked like, and also what Rufus was showing me when I tried to set up the boot drive as UEFI bootable drive.
Thank you for all of your help
cheers

                   

---

(03-18-2015, 05:30 PM)SteveSi Wrote:  When Hirens XP boots, it looks for a drive that contains the Hirens files and folders and adds them to the Desktop via a script that executes when the Desktop loads. If the extra Desktop icons are not displaying then it means it cannot 'see' the source drive.
Are you connecting the USB drive to a USB 3.0 port by any chance?

Hello Steve, I was actually writing the previous post at the same time you must've been writing your post. It was the 3.0 that was the problem.

---

(03-18-2015, 01:31 PM)Compton Wrote:  I think you can create a create UEFI bootable USB using rufus

but you said you try that already

did you zero out the flash drive and rewrite the iso with image usb

As you can see in the pictures below Rufus would not create a UEFI boot disk with HIRENS. It would only create a conventional one.
       

[SteveSi]

To boot via UEFI (not CSM\MBR\Legacy boot) you need two things (to start with)...
a) A FAT partition (could be in a GPT partitioned disk or just a plain FAT/FAT16/FAT32 MBR style partition)
b) A correctly named and positioned .EFI boot file which matches the UEFI implementation

e.g. for Intel x86  32-bit UEFI firmware  (note that this is not necessarily a 32-bit CPU, as a system containing a 64-bit CPU may contain 32-bit UEFI firmware) - there MUST be a \EFI\boot\bootia32.efi file on a FAT partition.
For an x86 64-bit UEFI firmware implementation, there MUST be a \EFI\boot\bootx64.efi file on the FAT partition.

Typically, Hirens does not contain these files and cannot UEFI-boot. Unless you have a special version which contains one or both of these .EFI files, you can only boot Hirens via the old MBR\CSM\Legacy route.
This may be useful.

[markinhfx]

Thank you I will read, I would like to put a number of my discs such as HIRENS, and FalconFour on one USB drive. Perhaps easy to boot will be the answer.

[Compton]

parted magic is pretty good and Support for 32bit uEFI https://partedmagic.com/

[Britec]

SteveSi to the rescue 

[markinhfx]

(03-18-2015, 06:02 PM)SteveSi Wrote:  To boot via UEFI (not CSM\MBR\Legacy boot) you need two things (to start with)...
a) A FAT partition (could be in a GPT partitioned disk or just a plain FAT/FAT16/FAT32 MBR style partition)
b) A correctly named and positioned .EFI boot file which matches the UEFI implementation

e.g. for Intel x86  32-bit UEFI firmware  (note that this is not necessarily a 32-bit CPU, as a system containing a 64-bit CPU may contain 32-bit UEFI firmware) - there MUST be a \EFI\boot\bootia32.efi file on a FAT partition.
For an x86 64-bit UEFI firmware implementation, there MUST be a \EFI\boot\bootx64.efi file on the FAT partition.

Typically, Hirens does not contain these files and cannot UEFI-boot. Unless you have a special version which contains one or both of these .EFI files, you can only boot Hirens via the old MBR\CSM\Legacy route.
This may be useful.

Hello Steve, I hope this is not a dumb question… Is it possible to have both of these files implemented on the same USB drive? And that it would also then be able to boot into a legacy system as well? Or is it required that you have a variation for each? I ask for for when one is trying to boot a system that will not boot into Windows. In other words I am trying to create a master rescue disk with numerous utilities that would be able to boot any system.

Thank you in advance
Mark

[SteveSi]

It depends on what you want to boot. For instance, you can boot to WinPE via UEFI-32 or UEFI-64 or BIOS.
See https://www.rmprepusb.com/tutorials/127-make-dual-32-64bit-pe
UEFI-boot files are completely different from MBR\BIOS boot files.
Some linux distros, e.g. Clonezilla, can also MBR or UEFI32/64 boot.
The problem comes when you want a multi-boot USB drive that you want to boot to a variety of different payloads and OS's.
grub2 can MBR and UEFI-boot, but you need to hand-craft the menu and payload files and not everything will work.
That is why I took the approach of using separate partition images with Easy2Boot and keeping everything 'simple', so that you can boot virtually any single-partition UEFI-32/64 payload or MBR boot it. The downside of E2B is that you need to boot to MBR mode first in order to select a UEFI image partition, but this can be done on a VM (e.g. use QEMU or MobaLiveCD.exe or VBox) rather than a real system.