I've been a huge fan of the UBCD and Bart's PE for a while now. I stumbled upon UBCDWin yesterday and spent most of the day setting it up, pulling over custom plugins, etc.

I ended up making a Combo UBCD/INSERT/UBCDWin CD and it works great (thanks to the guide!).

I use Acronis True Image frequently, and have a standalone boot CD that I'd like to incorporate into the UBCD main menu if possible. However, I've having a hard time finding guides on how to do this.

From what've read, the True Image BCD is linux based and it has the following structure:

\Recovery Manager\
bootmenu.exe
bootwiz.sys
f11.cfg
kernel.dat
mouse.com
ramdisk.dat

Is it possible to add True Image BCD to my Combo CD?

Well, I'm not sure. Is the software ISOLinux based? If so, you cannot have INSERT and another ISOLinux based boot CD on the same CD (trust me, I've tried a million different ways and it just will not work). If it's not ISOLinux based, then it may work, though I'm not quite sure how, as I don't see any .bin file or anything to boot from. Are you absolutely sure that's the entire structure of the software boot CD? Do you have the view hidden files and folders option enabled in Windows? Just making sure we aren't missing anything. Thanks.

I've got system and hidden files turned on,, so that's everything on the CD. I don't see anything related to ISOlinux, so I assume it's not based on that.

Not sure if this is helpful, but this is the content of f11.cfg:

[start]
echo Starting Acronis True Image...
initrd ramdisk.dat /s
kernel kernel.dat quiet
quiet on
mbrcrcs on
vga vesa

[continue]
sysboot /active

[bootmgr]
default continue
delay 30

Does that help at all?

All Acronis bootable media can be booted using ISOLinux. Here's what I have in my ISOLINUX.CFG file (note I use plain jane ISOLinux, not cd shell).



Where kernel.dat and ramdisk.dat are in ACRONIS/TI8/ relative to the root of the CD.

Cheers

I forgot to mention that you won't be able to test it out under a virtual environment (or at least QEMU or VirtualPC). It will just get an error and bomb out. It should work fine on a real PC though.

Cheers

So by using Jotnar's method, it would be impossible to have boot True Image and INSERT (from the UBCD) on a single bootable CD?

Correct. You can't have two ISOLinux based boot CDs on one CD (it's just impossible, as I've found out not just by experience, but by the acutal abilities of the ISOLinux system). At work, I must add to my combo CD Novell ZENWorks Imaging boot CD which is ISOLinux based and thus I must scrapt INSERT and just use the basic version of the UBCD. If anyone knows of any ways to get around this, please post, but I don't think there is one. But in your situation, if there's another way to boot the CD without using ISOLinux, then maybe that's the way to go, I'm not sure though...

Also, I'm not sure why Jotnar said it wont work in QEMU or in any virtual environment as I've test Novell ZENWorks Imaging in there many times just fine.

Oh well, thanks for all the help guys. I'll probably just scrap INSERT and use the basic version of the UBCD. That would let me have UBCDWin, UBCD (basic), and True Image all on one CD.

Besides, when it comes to Linux, I prefer Damn Small Linux much more than INSERT, and I've already got it on mini CDRW.

@LittlBUGer

Why do you have trouble with multiple ISOLinux based boot CD's? I remember that there was a problem multibooting two knoppix based ones (as they both look for the KNOPPIX folder on the root of the CD), but I know you can have multiple ISOLinux based ones boot fine. Here's a sample from my ISOLINUX.CFG file:



NTPW = NT Offline Password Changer 12/05/04 (CD Version)
SLAX = SLAX 4.20
DD9 = Acronis Disk Director 9
TI8 = Acronis True Image 8

I put each in their seperate folder and modify the kernel and initrd paths accordingly. Everything has worked fine so far.

Acronis True Image 7 and up get a Virtual Disk Error then kernel panic in both QEMU and VirtualPC. Bugged me for the longest time because I thought I was doing something wrong in my isolinux config, but then I actually burned the CD and it ran fine on a real PC.

Cheers


Edit... To those who want to multiboot two Knoppix based distros, look here for instructions.

Well, based on the instructions I found off of the UBCD customization section, on how to add any ISOLinux based boot CD to the UBCD (and thus to the combo CD), it said it was impossible to have two ISOLinux boot CDs on the same CD, as when you edited the menus and added the command to boot off of the boot CD bin file, such as:


It would then search at the root of the CD for the first ISO linux CD it found and boot it. It if wasn't at the root, it would search the ISOLinux folder and boot from there. It didn't matter if the .bin file was in a completely different folder, it would still first search the root of the CD and so on so it would only ever boot one ISOLinux boot CD. I tried very hard to find a way around this and nothing has worked. I'm pretty sure I even tried what you suggested but it didn't seem to want to work either.

Anyway, thanks for the information. For me (at work), losing INSERT and having our program instead which we use very heavily wasn't a big deal, so I didn't think much about it after I couldn't get both to work at the same time. Hopefully your code will help blueweasel though.

@LittlBUGer

Ok....I had some free time this evening and puttered around with this. Looking in the UBCD's main.scn file I can see where they call INSERT here:



Now what you can do (according to the cdshell documentation) is tack on the arguements after the 'isolinux' and it would be just like you were typing it in at the ISOLinux boot prompt.

eg..



This is providing that you extract the contents of your ZENWorks Boot CD to a folder called ZEN on the root of your CD. You will need to have the SETTINGS.TXT and the LINUX3.TGZ files be on the root of the CD in order for ZENWorks to function correctly. I tested this out tonight w/ vanilla ISOLinux and the contents of the ZENWorks 6.5 bootcd.iso from zfd65img4.exe. I'll give it a whirl with CDShell tomorrow, but it should work as described.

Cheers

Thanks for the info! I was trying to do something very similar, but it never panned out. Thanks for showing what I misssed.

Hey Jotnar, I've just tried this with the new UBCD 3.3 and it will not work. It begins to load ZEN and then errors out (screen goes blank). I noticed that CDShell was updated and so was the isolinux command, but I can't figure out what the problem is. Any ideas? Thanks for the help.

I think I figured it out. I have a bootable .iso file of the ZEN CD. By adding that to the combo CD (but still putting the settings.txt and linux3.tgz in the root) and saying:



It worked great. I guess the new diskemu and other things now allow this (it didn't before) so thanks for the help. I'll do some more testing to be sure, but I think this is the solution.