Every Grub command you see can be placed inside menu.lst. Afterall Grub goes to execute menu.lst if it finds it. If not it boots to a Grub prompt.

Don't think you understand the booting process.

Grub never in its life boots a MS Windows because Grub cannot even read a NTFS filing system.

Grub only passes the control to the boot loader residing inside a Windows partition.

Grub can boot up a Vista/Win7 installer "indirectly" because Grub boots up the boot sector code inside a certain partition by load it into the memory and buggers off for tea. That boot sector code then loads bootmgr. boomgr then loads the installer if there is no installed system in the BCD store to be loaded.

Every MS installer therefore needs a partition. The front end of a partition has a boot sector especially reserved for this purpose. The bootsect.exe is the tools to put the boot sector code into the partition. It is available in every installer.

What a MS installer goes about to load a system and in what subfolder has nothing to do with Grub and I doubt if it can be influenced by an outsider at all.

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It is possible to modify the bootmgr settings file (like boot.ini) to be able to choose between different installed Windows systems, like if you have 1 harddrive with Vista and 1 with Win7. However, the question is if it's possible to modify the bootmgr settings to boot different Windows systems located on the same partition, in subfolders, then it would be possible to have different windows installers on the same partition. You just have to point the bootmgr to the subfolder. I don't know if this is possible, but I doubt it.

todda7,

Your thread has caused me to investigate into putting Windows installers into a pen drive.

During the course I did discover a few things and manage to pack 4 MS installers into a 16 Gb pen drive.

Here are the two threads I wrote to record my investigation.

4 Vista/Win7 installation DVD in one pen drive

How to boot Grub after removing it.

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Great job saikee!
I learned quite a lot, I specially liked the trick about booting USB on a computer not supporting USB booting in BIOS using GRUB on a live CD or floppy.

I am however not satisfied yet!
1) Do you know why you got the "please insert CD/DVD-rom driver" when booting 3 of the 4 Win installers?
2) Do you think this can be avoided if you hardmod the USB jump drive into thinking it's a hard drive?
3) Would'nt all this be easier if you replaced the MBR with GPT? I mean
a) You would'nt have the restriction of 4 primary partitions, but 128 instead
b) This would save you a lot of work with beeing able to boot a deleted GRUB1 or booting from floppy each time
c) No partition limitations!
d) Maybe it would solve the "Pleas insert CD/DVD-rom driver" problem as well?
So the question is would GPT and Grub2 be an easier solution for booting multiple Windows installers? Or would hardmodding the jumpdrive solve the problem of booting >1 Win installer?
EDIT: As far as I know, the "a required cd dvd device driver is missing" is usually caused by a corrupt installation, have you tried downloading the ISO's and extracting them to the jump drive instead of copying them of a CD?
EDIT2: And try to disconnect ALL your CD/DVD-roms before launching the setup!
EDIT3: GREAT NEWS! What?

http://www.windowsvalley.com/create-...in-single-dvd/
If we could solve the DVD-Rom driver problem, this would make it possible to have ALL Win7 editions - and 2 modified Win 7 installers (I enjoy creating my own slipstreamed, tweaked, pre-configured super-duper Windows 7 installers) - and 1 extended partitions housing billions of Linux distributions and Grub1 - with no hassle at all.

I have thought of gpt and probably look into it but officially no MS System can be booted from a gpt hard disk unless the mobo has the efi hardware.

As far as I know only the 64-bit MS systems can see and use a gpt disk and none of their boot loaders can boot it. The booting apparently comes from the efi but I haven't got it so I can't tell. Therefore if a MS installer can be fired up in a gpt disk it is unintentional or accidental not thought out by M$.


The flipping of the binary bit in the USB to make MS thinks it is a fixed disk is not well documented and apparently refers to the controller and not the USB device itself. I have kept myself away from it as I could use Grub.

Both Grub1 and Grub2 can boot the pen drive. In fact I have used Grub2 more as I simply use whatever available in the PC I work on.

I might get over this CD/DVD driver thing if I try hard enough but I dislike wasting time to get over M$ system hurdles for absolutely no improvement to one's understanding of computing.

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I absolutely get it, but think of it as trying to do something NO ONE ELSE HAS DONE BEFORE, and the big, meaningless hurdle is MS and not Mount Everest.

I will try myself, when I get my jump drive.

Feedback to "Four Win7 installation DVD's on one flashdrive":
(ii) Copy the contents of each MS Windows installation DVD into each partition of the flash drive. This can be done either in Linux or MS Windows.
Nope, it cannot (without hiding it in Windows manually) be done in Windows as you cannot see each partition of the flashdrive.

todda7 ,

In the write-up I actually put the 4 primary partitions in a USB hard disk first so Windows could operate on all 4 primaries including copying and doing the bootsect.exe.

When the USB hard disk was ready I cloned its content onto the flash drive. WOrking with a USB hard disk is a lot faster. In fact I inserted the hard disk into my mobile rack to run it as an internal hard disk to reduce the waiting time.

Yes I know this, but in the beginning you say (ii) Copy the contents of each MS Windows installation DVD into each partition of the flash drive. This can be done either in Linux or MS Windows.
An external hard drive is not a flash drive. This may confuse people as they would presume that you copied the DVD's to the USB Jump drive, and not to the external drive.

Thanks for drawing attention to me. I have edited the thread to make it clearer.

By the way I solved the missing driver for the cd/dvd drive by the installers and all 4 installation DVD can boot and install. New information has been added to the 1st thread mentioned in Post #33.

Great! However, I remember you (or maybe I read it somewhere else) talking about the Windows/CMD alternative to the GRUB/Linux hide command. Have you tried to execute this (I don't know how.. Maybe in a bootmgr config file?) instead of the hide command?

I tried and found out bootmgr only goes to the 1st partition in the partition table to load the system files. Hiding the partitions before the one needed to be booted does not help and generates the error of "missing driver for the CD/DVD drive", remeber?.

I came up with a scheme to overcome the above though but I can only finish my write up when I am at home later.

I can now put all the WIndows installation DVDs in the "logical" partitions. Check for the updates, which are under preparation, in the above mentioned thread.

Just another pointer on gpt partitioning scheme.

I have tried to use gpt partitions in the flash drive. This works perfectly in Linux and I was able to copy all the MS installation DVD onto it.

Just as I expected Vista and Win7 support gpt so they can mount the partition. However they get confirmation from the controller that the flash drive is a movable so only the first partition could be mounted.

I was able to write the boot sector code on the gpt partition using the "bootsect.exe" command and everything seemed to work until I tried to boot up the gpt partition. The installer reported "Error 0xc0000225".

After trying a second time I came to the conclusion the Vista and Win7 installers are not bootable from a gpt flash drive. According to M$ web site MS systems do not even accept gpt on a movable disk.

So don't waste time to put Vista/Win7 installation DVD on a flash drive partitioned with a Gpt scheme as they don't boot.

They boot alright if the flash drive has the normal Msdos partitions.

Thank you for trying
The solution seems to be to just have 1 msdos/win installer with all version's in it (windows aio installer, posted link before). The linux-installers is a nobrainer.

todda7,

You might have got it wrong.

Each MS Windows Vista and Win7 has its own installer activated by the setup.exe. A typical installation DVD of Vista-32 home edition is show below
You can place one installation DVD's contents in each logical partition in a flash drive. Whichever one you wish to use for installation you must remove temporarily the logical partitions before the one you wish to boot so that its installer can get all files from the first partition form the pen drive. Failing to do that will make the installer to report "missing driver for the CD/DVD drive".

You don't need to mesh with anything inside the logical partition except doing a "bootsect /nt60 c:" thereby making it chainloadable by Grub. The files of each installation DVD are never touched or moved to another place.

No no no, you don't understand
Look here:http://www.windowsvalley.com/create-...in-single-dvd/
32 and 64 bit, all versions of Win7. One bootmgr, one setup.exe, one partition.