FAQ

1. What can be added to the USB disk with WinSetupFromUSB?
2. Does it support multiple sources of the same type?
3. My internal disk is not shown during first (Text mode) part of Windows XP (2000, 2003) setup
4. There is error 0x0000007B on blue background (BSOD) at start of XP (2000, 2003) Setup
5. Program does not display my USB disk
6. Are customized Windows sources supported?
7. What do the advanced options do?
8. My system won't boot from USB
9. Is (U)EFI supported?
10. How do I add another Windows or Linux source?
11. When adding NT6 (Vista and above setup or PE based utility) ISO occupied space on the USB disk is 150-220 MB more than my source
12. Is the program free and may it be freely redistributed?
13. XP/2003/2000 Setup is very slow when copying files at Text mode phase
14. How to report bugs or problems with the program?
15. How to remove already added sources?
16. How to edit boot menu names?
17. I am unable to add Linux/Other grub4dos ISO because it cannot be de-fragmented
18. Why I cannot boot other sources in UEFI mode, only Windows ones?
19. Is Windows Secure Boot supported?

852 thoughts on “FAQ

  1. WinSetupFromUSB is an amazing utility. I love it. I have a question, I prepare a master USB installer using this which worked fine for several weeks. Later on something unknown happened and on booting PC from this USB, there was no “OS to install” selection page. Instead it had a prompt on back screen with grey text. I thought USB flash drive was “perhaps” corrupted so I formatted it and once again created “universal installer for PC” having WinXP, Win7, WIn8, Win10, WinServer2008 etc. etc. once again it worked fine for couple of time but once again it ended up with only a prompt on black screen and no page appeared for selection of desired OS to install.

    • What’s the prompt on that black screen? Does it say anything? Are you booting every time in same mode, be it BIOS/compatible or UEFI? Is the USB disk reliable?

      • On booting from USB, first screen appears with a menu asking to choose F1 to continue boot to Grub4dos (default) and F2 for launching PLoP boot manager. Screen waits just for 1 or 2 seconds and select the default which instead of going to OS selection page (when working fine…the page with cyan background and entries for available OS installer) next screen appears with stating GRUB4DOS version on the top and following text thereafter:
        [ Minimal Bash-like line editing is supported. For the first word, TAB list possible command completion. Anywhere else TAB lists the possible combinations of device/filename. Esc at any time exists. ]
        grub> _

        Pressing escape takes to another mane with following enteries:
        find /menu.lst. /boot/grub/menu.lst. /grub/menu.lst
        commandline
        reboot
        halt

      • On booting from USB, first screen appears with a menu asking to choose F1 to continue boot to Grub4dos (default) and F2 for launching PLoP boot manager. Screen waits just for 1 or 2 seconds and select the default which instead of going to OS selection page (when working fine…the page with cyan background and entries for available OS installer) next screen appears with stating GRUB4DOS version on the top and following text thereafter:
        [ Minimal Bash-like line editing is supported. For the first word, TAB list possible command completion. Anywhere else TAB lists the possible combinations of device/filename. Esc at any time exists. ]
        grub> _

        Pressing escape takes to another mane with following enteries:
        find /menu.lst. /boot/grub/menu.lst. /grub/menu.lst
        commandline
        reboot
        halt
        ========
        UDB disk is reliable, using BIOS in Legacy mode, installer was made using FAT32 FS

        • Grldr, which is grub4dos boot loader, can’t find its config file menu.lst and drops to shell.
          I would run chkdsk to see if the file system is corrupted. Might happen easily with FAT32, especially if disk is unplugged without using safely remove hardware button for example. Check also if menu.lst is present in root directory.

  2. Can you help me once more…I went and added one more program while free space on my usb was about 1,5 GB and iso of that program is 648 MB. Winsetupfromusb says: Couldn’t defragment because of free space and something…I chose Cancel and it said Job Done. Now Usb drive still has 744Mb free space. Will that program not work correctly? is there a way to remove it?

    • It’s extremely unlikely that disk had enough contiguous free space so that the file can be defragmented, given how little free space left.
      It’s WinContig used internally for defragmenting files, but I highly doubt other program would have succeeded.

      As a rule of thumb, such sources have to be added first to freshly formatted drive, when there is plenty of contiguous free space.

      There is a FAQ above how to remove source.

  3. That program gave fatal error when loaded and says couldn’t load file because its fragmented…I checked fragmentation on Usb and it is 29%. The program I was trying to add is ESET SysRescue Live disk and I also want to add Kaspersky Rescue disc. Both of them weight about 1.2 GB, free space before I added ESET SysRescue Live disk was 1.5Gb. What should I do now?

  4. I want to make My USB Flash Drive bootable as following:

    File System: NTFS (to Store large File more then 10GB)
    Bootable: UEFI & Legacy both
    OS: Windows 10 Pro 64bit (UEFI)
    Software: Acronics 2016 (Legacy & UEFI both)
    Hiren Boot: HBCD_PE_x64 (Legacy & UEFI both)

  5. The usb won’t boot, I’m not sure every machine has Grub4Dos and I don’t know what to do, I didn’t find any information on how to effeciently debug this. Even in the QEMU test it doesn’t boot right away, but loads Grub4Dos first. How can I make the QEMU test find the usb directly.

    • Grub4dos is a boot managers on the USB disk, it’s not on the machines.
      Can you describe with details what “won’t boot” means?
      The QEMU test presents the USB disk as local disk and it does have to load grub4dos first.

  6. I would like to have a working windows install on top of winsetupfromusb. Be it on the same partition or on a second partition, how can I do about it?

  7. I am trying to add a 1.94 GB Linux ISO to a WinSetupFromUSB USB that was formatted with FBInst, and has 11.6 GB free space before adding this ISO, and 9.75 GB free space after adding it.

    WSFU complained that there was insufficient space to defragment the iso, and gave me a choice of “retry” or “cancel”. Selecting “retry” just resulted in the same message.

    I deleted the fragmented (?) iso, and the corresponding menu.lst entry. I also deleted another 1.9 GB ISO, so there would be more room, although it seems that 9.75 GB *should* be sufficient.

    This time, and every subsequent attempt, the program hung while displaying “defragmenting…”, and had to be cancelled with Task Manager (which showed Aut2Exe and Windefrag using most of the CPU and large chunks of memory).

    • It’s about how much _contiguous_ space is available. Even 1 chunk of another file somewhere in the middle is enough to make the next file placed fragmented and Windows does not provide controls where the next file is to be put and whether to fragment it or not.
      Judging by the TOTAL free space is wrong, this does not represent _contiguous_ free space.

      You might try other defragmenting programs preferably with ability to consolidate the free space, there are a few afaik. I opted for using WinContig because it’s free and can be scripted and that time there was no similar alternative.

      Best advice I can give, is to always start with sources which need defragmented files, after fresh format, then add the windows sources.

      • Defragmenting a USB drive? Isn’t that like defragmenting an SSD? Also, I tried just copying the ISO to the drive, since the menu.lst already pointed to it. It boots from the ISO, and then hangs.

        • Not sure what you mean by like SSD.
          The requirement comes from grub4dos which needs contiguous file to be able to map and boot it in a way which is compatible with nearly all linux distros.
          What ISO hangs at what stage displaying what error?

          • What I mean by “like SSD”, is that USB flash drives, like SSD’s don’t benefit from defragmentation, and the additional write operations involved in defragging shorten the life of the drive, so we are told not to defrag them.

            -WinSetupfromUSB hangs while “defragmented” linuxmint-19_3-cinnamon-64bit.iso

            -Since it was added to menu.lst, I tried copying it to the ..\ISO folder. Then I tried booting from it. When I selected it from the menu.lst, it started to boot, bringing up its own menu. I selected “run linumint”. It then flashed some error message too quickly to read, and hung.

            -I then tried the same thing with linuxmint-19_2-cinnamon-64bit.iso, and I got a black screen with a white block cursor in the middle — which is strange, because I think I’ve booted that one successfully before.

          • Tried it again.
            When I booted from linuxmint-19_1-cinnamon-64bit.iso, I got:
            Booting linuxmint-19_2-cinnamon-64bit.iso from partition 0
            128 (Hex: 0x80)
            File system type is Fat, Partition Type 0x0C
            Fatal error map rs ISO …
            Please check if present and deframented.
            When I booted from llinuxmint-19_2-cinnamon-64bit.iso, I got
            Auto boot in 10 seconds
            flashed some message too quickly to read
            black screen.
            Reset resulted in black screen with white cursor block in middle.
            Had to power down, and wait in order to reboot.

            Rebooted (from internal SDD) into Windoze 10, and ran Windoze 10 defrag. It says:

            Invoking defragmentation on WXP-LINUX-0 (H:)…
            Pre-Optimization Report:
            Volume Information:
            Volume size = 29.50 GB
            Free space = 7.91 GB
            Total fragmented space = 0%
            Largest free space size = 1.76 GB

            So that seems to confirm what you said. If the largest free space is 1.76GB, there isn’t room for a contiguous 1.94 GB file. And the 19.1 and 19.2 that booted previously were deleted and then re-added, so they probably aren’t contiguous either.

            The Windoze defrag, like WinContig, appears to hang, so I’m going to try copying the disk, file by file, to a new disk, which (hopefully) will create contiguous sectors for each file. Any other suggestions?

            • Can try “Defraggler”, it can defrag the free space first, then move files around.

              WinSetupFromUSB uses a trick when formatting in NTFS to reduce the chance of Windows putting the NTFS meta files right in the middle of a newly formatted volume as it typically does, thus cutting the contiguous free space in half, so if going to try copying files, you better fresh format the second drive using WSFUSB, then just add the same way these Linux Mint sources, but do them first.

              Just copying files to another drive again gives you no guarantee they will end up contiguous. As said- Windows does not provide any controls or API whatsoever to achieve that.

  8. Hi itaushanov,

    I’ve recently obtained a machine (Asus X102BA) which only supports UEFI boot. I undeestand that WinSetUpFromUSB does not support booting Linux distros under UEFI (because Grub4Dos – which can’t support UEFI – is integral to its operation), but I have been able to boot from a Linux Live CD on a USB stick using Rufus 2.18.1213, so would it be possible for you to create a separate UEFI-only version of WinSetUpFromUSB (which doesn’t use Grub4Dos) to offer multi-USB-boot under UEFI – using an extraction process similar to that of Rufus (and I guess Unetbootin)? I don’t want to have to keep trashing my USB stick every time I want to install/run another Linux distro on it 😎

    Still loving this little utility BTW 😎

    Cheers,

    Alex

    • Hi Alex, grub4dos has an unique feature which allow to boot just about any Linux ISO by mapping it to a fake partition, which later on kernel finds and mounts, just as if booted from the ISO. Grub4dos doesn’t and won’t support UEFI and no other bootloader supports similar feature, yet.
      Single source would be easy to add, but I am not interested in such option for UEFI.

      In short- until some bootloader, likely grub2, has something similar, we are stuck 🙂

      • OK, fair enough. I just thought you might be to adapt something like Rufus so that one USB memory stick could be used to house multiple UEFI ISOs (or extracted forms of them) so that one could be chosen to be booted from a menu at boot time. Just something simple like that. Saves trashing the memory stick every time you want to boot a different ISO on a UEFI-only machine. Cheers – Alex

      • Hi again itaushanov,

        I’ve been looking into this problem (booting ISOs from a flash drive on UEFI-only firmware) and I’ve just come across the following:

        http://murga-linux.com/puppy/viewtopic.php?t=117536

        This seems to suggest that it’s possible to create a flash drive that will boot ISOs (using Grub2) which will work for both legacy BIOS/MBR and modern UEFI firmwares. Perhaps you could create a tool (like the most excellent WinSetUpFromUSB) which automates the process for people? That would be VERY cool 😎

        Alex

        • I am afraid that’s not universal solution, been there seen that, long ago…

          That relies on passing a kernel parameter which tells the init script which iso file to search for and mount. Unfortunately, there is large variety of linux distros, each using its own parameter, and some don’t even have such. On top of that, behaviour might change across the versions. Debian based distros for example, did not search for ISO file on USB hard drives of fixed type if I recall correctly, not sure if and when that was fixed.

          Maintaining a huge list of distros, veraions and their specifics in order to pass the correct kernel parameter is not feasible.

      • Sorry, just a quick observation after reading that post I linked to: I believe under XP it is only possible to see the first partition on a USB flash drive (without some jiggery pokery), so I guess it would be better to create the ESP as the 2nd partition on the flash drive and the main partition (holding the ISOs) on the 1st partition.

        (But I guess you will have thought of that already.)

        • Not only XP does that, later Windows versions also do the same. It’s to do whether the USB disk is of fixed or removable type. If fixed- proceed with mounting all partitions. If removable- only the first one is usable without special drivers.

  9. Olá, gostaria de saber se você possui uma lista com os comandos que podem ser utilizados no menu.lst. Por exemplo, vi que posso pular linhas no menu utilizando comandos. Gostaria de entender a estrutura do menu.lst. Obrigado.

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