FlashBoot 2.1E (Installer + Portable)
FlashBoot is a tool to make USB disks bootable.
Its primary focus is USB Flash disks, but other types of USB devices are supported as well. Making disk bootable involves formatting and copying operating system files to it. Different operating systems are supported: Windows 7/Vista, Windows XP, SysLinux-based disks, GRUB4DOS disks, Linux kernel etc.
You may create blank bootable USB flash with minimal set of system files and then manually tune it for your needs, or convert a full-featured bootable CD-ROM or floppy disk to bootable USB Flash keeping all functionality.
FlashBoot can either format physical disk or write an image file. So you may create customized USB disk manually or with another tool and use FlashBoot to create image out of it and redistribute it in local network or online.
FlashBoot 2.0 is a major step forward towards improvement of the software and satisfying user needs. Its code was rewritten from the ground up since old version 1.4 released in 2006.
Here is a list of improvements:
- Full compatibility with Windows Vista and Windows 7, both x86 and x64 editions
- Support for USB disks larger than 4 GB (up to 2 TB)
- Support for conversion of Windows XP/Vista/7 installation CD to bootable USB disk
- Support for extraction of Windows XP recovery console to bootable USB disk
- Support for conversion of generic CD discs to bootable USB disks (operating system or boot loader of such generic CD disc must access boot device exclusively via BIOS API)
- Support for multiformat USB disks (FlashBoot 2 does not shift to user the burden of choice between "USB-ZIP" and "USB-HDD" anymore. There is one unified format, "Multiformat", and every USB disk is formatted by FlashBoot will work in all conditions: both USB-ZIP and USB-HDD. This is for sake of maximum compatibility.)
- Support for boot time mapping to either A: or C:, chosen by user at format time, not by machine-specific BIOS at boot time
- Support for explicit specification of USB disk CHS geometry by user at format time, not by machine-specific BIOS at boot time
- Greater BIOS and USB disk compatibility (explicit measures taken in order to support BIOSes which do not map USB boot disk to INT 13h devices 0 or 0x80; emulation of MBR track if it's stripped off by BIOS; FlashBoot loader always provides LBA and CHS disk access to USB disk for OS code).
- Autodetection of input CD/DVD/floppy/USB disk type. User does not have to make choice from long list of all possible disk types, it is detected automatically. But experienced user can override autodetection results and make choice from the full list.
- Less restrictive limitations of demo version (30-days bootability in V2 vs. one-time bootability in V1, 16 tries per physical USB disk in V2 vs. 10 tries per physical USB disk in V1)
- Full support for Unicode file names
- Command-line interface as alternative to GUI for users who need automation
- Improved old features (support for new SYSLINUX/ISOLINUX versions, BartPE, GRUB4DOS)
- Support for copying RAW, fixed-size image files to/from USB disks
- Support for full erase format (wipe) of USB disks
- Improved explanation for busy USB disks (reporting the full list of conflicting processes/windows)
- Improved error handling and reporting (especially for broken "silent-forgetter" flash memory cells)
- Better UI (more details, explicit warnings) to prevent unintended formatting of wrong USB disk from multiple plugged ones or USB HDD instead of USB Flash disk.
- NT password editor is now integrated to FlashBoot, end user does not have to download any additional third-party files to use this feature.
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