Kent, terrific. In BIU, Boot Edit, Mint, Edit. Is there a tick in Rename Directory? Is the Boot File \EFI\ubuntu.001\shimx64.efi
Hello @Brian K, Yes to both. While I was there, I changed "BIU > Boot Edit > Ubuntu > Edit > Boot details > Identity" from "Ubuntu" to "Mint" as I assume this changes the name shown on the BIU boot screen.
Kent, good work. I'd forgotten all Linux will appear as "ubuntu" by default in the Boot Menu. Everything has worked out really well. Apologies for not warning you earlier about BIU being inactivated by the Mint install. You have enough on your plate at the moment so I'll post details about TBWinRE and IFL in the next day or so. You have plenty of space available on the SSD so if you want an extra Windows or Linux in the future, no problem.
Hello @Brian K, Yes, I was going to suggest that if you were getting tired that we could take a break from this. No problem about the no warning, I probably needed to wake up anyways . For all of your help, thanks a lot. It is not only helping me but could possibly help others that may be interested in multi-booting Windows UEFI secure boot systems with other OS's and/or being able to set-up partitions for TBWinRE/PE and/or IFL booting also. Thanks again for the help so far and we can resume whenever you have the time.
I woke up... in BIU plug in a TBWinRE flash drive Disk Imaging (no mouse in this app) Copy Physical Drive select the USB drive select the partition and press the Spacebar (don't select Drive) Physical Drive select Hard Drive 0 (the SSD) select the 650 MiB of Free Space On the Copy Options screen use Tab to move around Resize Partition 550 MiB New Name TBWinRE In Options on the left side leave the three X alone put an X (use Spacebar) in Reboot when Completed Start Back in BIU Boot Edit Add Identity... TBWinRE choose an Icon HD 0 Boot... choose TBWinRE Boot File... click Browse select efi and press Enter select boot and press Enter select bootx64.efi and press OK Rename Directory is greyed out. Ignore it. OK, OK The boot item should work. If it's OK proceed to IFL. in BIU plug in an IFL flash drive Disk Imaging (no mouse in this app) Copy Physical Drive select the USB drive select the partition and press the Spacebar (don't select Drive) Physical Drive select Hard Drive 0 select the 100 MiB of Free Space On the Copy Options screen use Tab to move around Ignore Resize Partition New Name IFL In Options on the left side leave the three X alone put an X (use Spacebar) in Reboot when Completed Start Back in BIU Boot Edit Add Identity... IFL choose an Icon HD 0 Boot... choose IFL Boot File... click Browse select efi and press Enter select boot and press Enter select bootx64.efi and press OK Rename Directory is greyed out. Ignore it. OK, OK
Hello @Brian K, All of the above are done and both TBWinRE and IFL boot ! Thanks so much for all of your help ! I think that takes care of pretty much everything... I have a few things now on my personal to-do list to learn for the future. How to update both the TBWinRE and IFL partitions. I assume it will be as simple as updating the flash drives and then going to BIU and doing a "Disk Imaging > Copy" operation. How to update BIU which I assume is as simple as updating the flash drive and using it to install the new version. How to install/use the BootNow file for rebooting directly into whichever system I want. All of these can come later as all of the major stuff has been done and it will probably a month or so before any updates anyways. Again, thanks for all of your hand holding and help throughout all of this process. I do not know if I would have even attempted it without your help. I have been wanting to do something like this for a while now but never got the energy and/or courage to do it ...
You're correct, what a great thread, very informative. It's been great fun reading your conversation, I'm looking forward to using a setup like this as well. It will be easy with all the new stuff I've learned. Thank you very much! I'm looking forward to any and all extra info you might add (as you mentioned). Unfortunately, it will be a little while until I can test this on a real system (only have some 32bit UEFI systems here [Intel Edupads]), but as soon as I have a 64bit UEFI system to test, doing a multiboot setup will be easy with the info here.
Kent, To answer your first two questions... yes and yes. BootNow. Put the win32 bootnowu.exe in its own folder, any name, For example BNwin. Right click bootnowu.exe and click Create shortcut. The names to use in the shortcut will be the names in the Boot Menu. Let's say TBWinRE (case sensitive). Right click the shortcut, Properties. My Target line is... "F:\ShareB\bootnowuefi latest\win32\bootnowu.exe" Leave a space and type in the Boot Menu item. Such as... "F:\ShareB\bootnowuefi latest\win32\bootnowu.exe" TBWinRE Click OK. Now rename the shortcut to anything you like. For example TBWinRE. Right click the renamed shortcut, Pin To Start. You don't have to do this step but I like Pin to Start. But if Pin to Start isn't in use, double click the shortcut. You can have all the shortcuts in the bootnowu.exe folder. I haven't worked out Linux BootNow yet. Atari800xl, BIU is a really fun app but difficult when you first start using it. Just ask for help.
If Win10 is going to be your main OS go to the Boot Edit item for Win10, Edit, put a tick in Default. Click Settings, make the Timeout 3 seconds or whatever. If no choice has been made after 3 seconds, Win10 boots.
Hello @Brian K Well, so much for a month or so as TeraByte has published updates today for all of their products. I get to test my knowledge now in updating all of the work I did yesterday. You were a great teacher and I am fairly confident that I can proceed without any issues, especially since you verified that my assumptions for updating both the TBWinRE and IFL partitions along with updating BIU were correct. I will post back later as to how it goes. I will get to the BootNow stuff after I do the updates. I do have one question... I now have four entries in BIU that I can boot to. I am assuming that if I am in Windows, I can use BootNow as you described to boot to all four (including if I am in Windows to reboot back to Windows). The question comes from this: I am assuming that what you mean is that if I am in Mint, you have not figured out how to use BootNow there but I can use BootNow to boot from Windows to Mint (just not from Mint to anything else).
Hello @Brian K, Quick question: When I purchased the new BootIt bundle, my license code changed for several products. That is not a big deal for most products as they can be changed when needed when updating them. It also changed with TBOSDT and as you know you enter your license info on the first run but I see no way to change it. I do not know if this is anything to worry about or not as TBOSDT integrates with other product when you create certain rescue media. These license changes can be a bit confusing so I just wonder if this will affect anything and do I need to worry?
In C:\Program Files (x86)\TeraByte Drive Image Backup and Restore Suite\TeraByte OSD Tool Suite Pro\win delete the .ini file. It used to be bootitbm.ini but it might now be bootit.ini. The next time you run TBOSDT you will be asked for rego.
Hello @Brian K, OK, time for a progress report... Updated BIU - no issues. Updated TBWinRE partition - no issues. When I went to update the IFL partition, I was told the was not enough disk space. It required 106 MiB and I only had 100 MiB. The deal was yesterday when I created the original partition, it was the CUI version and I did not realize that was what I was installing at the time. I do not really care for that version and if I was going to try IFL, I thought that I had better change to the GUI version. The only thing was that the GUI version was to big for the partition so I had to resize it. The TBWinRE partition was low on free space also and with all the new stuff going on at TeraByte, I thought that I would resize it at the same time. That way I should have no issues as far as free space for the foreseeable future and not have to do this again anytime soon. So I resized the OS partition 200 MiB smaller giving me 200 MiB free space. I then slide the Mint partition up, followed by sliding the TBWinRE partition up also. I then resized the TBWinRE partition by adding 100 MiB of the free space to it making it now 650 MiB. I proceeded to slide the IFL partition up and resized it by adding the remaining 100 MiB free space to it making it now 200 MiB. I then tested all four bootable partitions and they all booted fine. Thanks to Brian's great tutoring, I was able to everything that I needed to do. Edited to add: What is strange is that BIU gave me a warning about not enough disk space, but once I am back in Windows, Windows sees the drive as "122 MB Free of 199 MB" so Windows is telling me that the partition was big enough... That was the easy part... Now for the scary part... This sounds very easy, right? I sure thought it was so I saved it for last. I made the changes in BIU and rebooted. I had set the timeout at 5 seconds with Windows as the default and all went exactly as it should. I thought cool and messed around in Windows a bit and the decided to boot to Mint. When the BIU screen came up, I clicked on Mint and the system froze/locked up. OK, maybe a glitch, so I did a hard reset and tried again but same thing. I tried several more times but I could not click on anything without the system freezing/locking up. I then tried a reinstall of BIU but the same issue kept happening. I put on a pot of coffee thinking all the time I had screwed things up. While I was drinking my coffee, a thought came to mind that I should try using the keyboard instead of the mouse. Guess what? That worked! So long story short: Without setting an OS as the default with a timeout, the mouse and keyboard both work on the BIU boot screen. But if enable those settings, the mouse quits working and you can only use the keyboard. Maybe a bug, maybe by design, I do not know but I really had thought that I had made a mess of things... Now to go finish that pot of coffee... and maybe try to conquer BootNow later...
Hello @Brian K, I do not have any .ini file at all in that folder so I thought it must be set in the registry. Also, when creating my new TBWinRE UFD, it would not accept my new BootIt key so I left the old key in place.
Hello @Brian K, I have finished setting up BootNow. I can boot from Windows to any of the four partitions with just a double-click on a desktop icon.
Kent, Nice work. Perfect. My fault again. I use "no net" IFL and it only consumes 60 MiB of space in the 100 MiB partition. My TBWinRE uses 414 MiB of space. IFW ver 3.16 (out of date on the test computer). But what you have done is fine. You are on top of partitioning. In Partition Work, HD0, select the EFI partition and click Properties, Details. What are Free and Used MiB? Weird. Can you email TeraByte Support and let them know.
Kent, can you try this? Go to C:\Program Files (x86)\TeraByte Drive Image Backup and Restore Suite\TeraByte OSD Tool Suite Pro\win Right click tbosdtw.exe and click Run as administrator. Does it ask for Rego info?
Hello @Brian K, For the EFI partition: 44 MiB free - 56 MiB used. The warning that I got about not enough space on the partition was when I tried to copy the new IFL from the UFD to the IFL partition. The warning said that I needed 106 MiB and at that time the partition was only 100 MiB. After I resized the IFL partition to 200 MiB, Windows reported for the IFL partition "122 MB Free of 199 MB" and BIU now shows: 123 MiB free - 77 MiB used. That was what I was referring to as being strange since the copy operation was only 77 MiB, not 106 MiB as the warning stated. I added this info because I was not sure you understood what I was originally saying. Done. No, it did not. I definitely remember using TBOSDT when I set up this system and entering the license info. So I am positive it is registered just do not know where it stores the license info since there is no .ini file for it present.
Kent, I misunderstood. All OK. When I first started working on the beta I had a few Win10 and the EFI system partition was almost full. Each Microsoft.xxx adds about 25 MiB of data. Each ubuntu.xxx adds 3 MiB. So if you want a lot of OS you need a larger ESP. TeraByte was one step ahead of me (not surprising) and suggested a 400 MiB ESP. If you install BIU to a blank empty drive you get a MSR and a 400 MiB ESP. You and I installed BIU to a drive containing an OS so we are potentially limited in the number of OS we can multi-boot. I resized my ESP to 400 MiB and if you are planning to multi-boot more OS in the future I suggest you do the same. Otherwise a 100 MiB ESP is fine. If your partitions are... Recovery ESP MSR Win10 etc ... this is what to do. Create an image of MSR. Then delete MSR Resize Win10 300 MB smaller Slide Win10 so there is zero Free Space after Resize ESP to 400 MiB Restore the MSR image to the Free Space between ESP and Win10 (MSR can't be resized or slid. Hence the image/restore)
Hello @Brian K, I will keep the above in mind. Also, I have already heard back from support. They cannot replicate my issue but others are reporting similar. Some users report that if you use the keyboard first, then the mouse will work. Support initial thoughts are it may be UEFI specific. They asked for make/model of system and BIOS version. If they can narrow it down there would possibly be a fix in the next update but it may be hard to do since they cannot replicate.
Kent, to use BootNow in Mint... In my Home directory I created a folder called bjk. In bjk I created another folder called bn. bootnowu (Linux file) was copied into bn. Use you own folder names. Right click bootnowu, Properties, Permissions tab. Put a tick in “Allow executing file as program” Open Terminal and enter these 3 lines. One at a time and press Enter. sudo apt-get install lib32ncursesw5 sudo chmod +x bjk/bn/bootnowu sudo apt-get install libc6-i386 lib32stdc++6 lib32gcc1 lib32ncurses5 lib32z1 win10 is one of my Boot Items. To load it... sudo bjk/bn/bootnowu win10 The only line you have to run on subsequent Mint boots is the last one.... sudo bjk/bn/bootnowu win10 sudo bjk/bn/bootnowu ifl etc You could script this line but I have other interests at present.
Hello @Brian K, I will bookmark the above post to come back to in a few days as I just going to clean everything up today and do a full backup as a reference image. In the next days I will look into adding BootNow to my other three partitions (Mint, IFL, and TBWinRE). I heard back from support again this morning and they think they have fixed my issue in BIU version 1.02 which was released today. I updated to the new version and it did indeed fix my issue.
TeraByte Support is amazing. Most of the edits to enable BootNow to work in Mint came from Support. Updating the 32-bit libraries in Mint and changing the permissions for bootnowu. I can get BootNow to work in IFL but I haven't tried it in TBWinRE. In my case I only use BootNow in Windows as after running Mint, IFL, etc, I usually want to get back into Win10 and BIU does that anyway as Win10 is the default after a 3 second wait time.
