Intro; MRI, Easyboot

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zeeeon
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Joined: 2009/07/13

Greets everybody,

I'm new to SoldierX but been in the scene a long time. Came across the group looking for more info customizing the GS MRI.
Been in the computer security scene since '95, I remember the 'glory days' before us hackers were known as 'Cyber Terrorists'....
Anyways thanks to all of the members and their hard work dissemenating the MRI and breaking it down, especially helpful were info and sources provided by RaT and Wallace, to name a few.

I've made some progress getting some usefulness out of the Easyboot menu interface and customizing it.
Generally, the main problem we get booting from ISO is the MRI bitches about not being able to find its directory structure and reboots on us.
I've been sucessful in getting around this by placing an unpacked copy of the MRI in the root of the usb stick ... its' redundant, I know - but in doing this it allows us to use Grub to boot into the Easyboot interface - which allows us to use some of the tools such as Acronis, etc. that we normally get can't to.

What I'm thinking is that the 'pathing' of how the MRI is 'burned' into its ISO is whats causing it not to detect it's file structure upon iso boot.
Placing the uncompressed contents of the image in the root of the stick (next to the packed .iso) allows the MRI to pass it's file structure requirement and sucessfully launch.

Here are some details on how I get the iso to boot if anyone wants to try it out -

1. Format the USB and make it bootable as per the other forum posts.
2. Copy the MRI ISO to the root of the stick.
3. Using UltraISO or your favorite ISO program, unpack the MRI iso onto your hdd (unpacking to your stick is painfully slow)
4. Copy the unpacked files to the root of your usb stick. At this point you should be using up about 1.35gb of space on the stick, and you have the roughly 700mb iso image of the MRI on the root of your usb stick, as well as the unpacked file structure of the MRI on the root of the stick.
5. Edit your menu.lst to the following -

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title Start Easyboot
find --set-root --ignore-floppies /name-of-your-MRI.iso
map /name-of-your-MRI.iso (hd32)
map --hook
chainloader (hd32)
boot
-------------------------------------------------------

This should boot the iso image of the MRI and you should see the Easyboot menu come up. Everything so far works perfectly, and you can even boot the MRI PE from here, and it will work.

If anyone tries this and its unsucessful, let me know and I'll try to help you out.

Some notes: I've mounted the boot.wim image in WAIK and modified several of the files of my installation. If you have done this, you MUST update the the ISO and the unpacked file structure with the new data. Both the ISO and the unpacked image must be exact replica's to reflect any custom changes you've made.

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Thoughts on the reason the MRI shell bitches about file structure when you just try to boot the iso (without the accompanying unpacked file structure)?
- I did the editing of the winpeshl.ini file suggested by wallace and committed the changes to the image and everything, but it still won't work.
I'm assuming its something to do with booting an iso9660 formatted image off a usb stick. I tried re-packing the iso without using Easyboot, but couldn't get the image to boot. Only way I could get the iso to boot was to use the Easyboot program to re-image the iso for me, then copy the resulting iso to the usb stick for boot.

Does anyone have any advice on how to fix this? Any suggestions would be tremendously helpful!

Thanks again for the great website, community and excellent information from everyone. I wouldn't have made it this far without the help from all of the contributing members.

hasta,
zeeeon