Monday, April 28, 2014

Make UBCD's Parted Magic boot from a USB drive



I love UBCD. It's a bootable CD with tools to do everything from securely shred hard drives to modify Windows registry from Linux. I also love YUMI. It allows you to create a bootable USB flash drive with multiple operating systems on it and even has support for adding or removing specific distros without killing your whole setup.

One problem. If you use YUMI to create a bootable USB drive with UBCD on it, the bundled version of Parted Magic will not boot. Parted Magic is really awesome for rescuing systems, etc. so I was disappointed about this. I checked my md5sum and it was good but when booting from my USB drive it would complain that it couldn't find the sqfs. When I burned the very same ISO to a CD, Parted Magic worked fine, though!

After not finding the information on Google and banging my head against a wall for a while, I was able to figure it out. Here's what I did:

1. Download YUMI and UBCD and use YUMI to add UBCD to the USB drive. If you need help with that part, there's lots of info on Google.

2. Extract your downloaded UBCD ISO. There is lots of info on Google on how to extract an ISO, also.

3. Once you've extracted your ISO, look for the pmagic folder and copy it to the root of your USB flash drive.

That's it! Pretty easy but was a bit of a headache to figure out! Hope this post helps you! If so, please comment and say hello. I try to respond to as many comments as possible.

By the way, if you use WINE to run YUMI from Linux as I did, beware that YUMI cannot format the drive even if you use sudo. The only way I was able to use it from Linux (Kali) was to use a USB drive that already had YUMI on it (which I installed from a Windows box a while ago). In other words, you can only modify your existing YUMI install from WINE, you can't do the initial YUMI install. If anybody finds a way around this, please comment below and let me know! Also, don't forget you'll have to use winecfg to connect WINE to your USB drive.

Happy hacking!


Tested on:
Kali Linux 1.0
SanDisk 16GB USB flash drive
VirtualBox 4.3.10 r93012 (using raw disk hack to boot to USB drive)
wine-1.4.1
YUMI-2.0.0.3
Ultimate Boot CD V5.2.9
PMAGIC_2013_08_01



9 comments:

  1. Thank you very much sir, this resolved my issue loading Parted Magic from Ultimate Boot CD on a USB drive.

    ReplyDelete
  2. http://www.911cd.net/forums//index.php?s=900f5374ee740b39460a8c65a696df6f&showtopic=24927&st=20

    ReplyDelete
  3. Hi,
    Thank you again for writing this post. I have tried what you have suggested, but I am still getting the .sqfs error. I am using UBCD 5.3.5 and the newest version of YUMI (as of 1/7/15). Here is my menu structure in the root directory:

    .disk
    Boot
    efi
    multiboot
    pmagic
    sources

    I also tried placing a copy of the pmagic folder in multiboot as well. Also, with multiboot is another folder named ubcd535 and I tried placing pmagic in here as well. If anyone has any thoughts it would be greatly appreciated!

    ReplyDelete
  4. Hi.. THanks for your help it worked :)For those who boot up to a black screen, this works too.. also check for brightness settings ;)

    ReplyDelete
  5. Nice...thanks! USB Created with YUMI..this worked for me.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Last UBCD with last Parted Magic (not free anymore)

    To create a bootable UBCD memory stick, at the command prompt, type:

    cd \ubcd-extracted\ubcd\tools\win32\ubcd2usb
    ubcd2usb c:\ubcd-extracted X:


    where X: is that drive letter of USB memory stick, which is assumed to
    be already formatted. If it is not already formatted, or you wish to
    force it to be formatted, you can add the /f switch at the end:

    ubcd2usb c:\ubcd-extracted X: /f


    The USB directory structure will looks like:

    [USB]
    ..boot\
    ..pmagic\
    ....boot\
    ....pmodules\
    ........bzImage
    ........initrd.img
    ..ubcd\


    Download the last Parted Magic (currently pmagic_2017_09_05.iso)
    Remove from the USB everything inside pmagic\
    From the last Parted Magic iso copy inside USB pmagic\ folder like that:

    [USB]
    ..boot\
    ..pmagic\
    ....boot\......<--- from [PM_2017_09_05]\boot
    ....pmodules\..<--- from [PM_2017_09_05]\pmagic\pmodules
    ........bzImage......<--- from [PM_2017_09_05]\pmagic
    ........bzImage64....<--- from [PM_2017_09_05]\pmagic
    ........fu.img.......<--- from [PM_2017_09_05]\pmagic
    ........initrd.img...<--- from [PM_2017_09_05]\pmagic
    ........m32.img......<--- from [PM_2017_09_05]\pmagic
    ........m64.img......<--- from [PM_2017_09_05]\pmagic
    ..ubcd\

    Done.

    Optionally, if you want to have an ISO file for that UBCD bundle, use

    cd X:\ubcd\tools\win32\ubcd2iso
    ubcd2iso X:\ c:\ubcd50-custom.iso

    This will create ubcd50-custom.iso in C:\

    ReplyDelete
  7. Thanks 4 years later! Was getting the .sqfs error when trying to boot to Hiren's BootCD 15.02 until I found this article. I had created the USB with UNetbootin on my Mac to clone a 12 year old Dell. When I copied the pmagic folder to the USB's root per your instructions it worked like a charm.

    ReplyDelete
  8. Hi, cheers for that. The problem still exists in September 2018, but copying the /pmagic folder to the USB root does resolve it.

    ReplyDelete

Spammy/foul language comments or those with an explicit avatar will be tossed in a 55 gallon drum and a match thrown in after them. (Oooo, now I can warm my hands!!)