I have a third party recovery bootable CD which I would like to incorporate into UBCD, if that is at all possible.

The recovery CD consists of these files:
dos\
bm.bin
bm_hide
bm_mbr
bm_stat
boot.catalog
cd.cfg
cd_plg.bmp
cd_plg.cfg
cd_plg.exe
dos.eng
dos.frn
dos.ger
dos.img
dos.itl
dos.jpn
dos.pls
dos.rus
dos.spn
initrd.gz
lilo.eng
lilo.frn
lilo.ger
lilo.itl
lilo.jap
lilo.rus
lilo.spn
memdisk
vmlinuzp

I opened UBCD.iso and copied all the dirs/files from the recovery CD into the /custom/recovery/ folder on the UBCD.iso. I then edited the file /custom/custom.cfg so it looks like this:

MENU INCLUDE /menus/defaults.cfg
LABEL back
MENU LABEL ..
KERNEL menu.c32
APPEND /menus/main.cfg
LABEL bootimg
MENU LABEL Your own boot image here
KERNEL memdisk
APPEND initrd=/custom/recovery/dos.img

I then burned the UBCD.iso and booted from it. I went into the custom menu and started the entry for the recovery CD but the recovery CD didn't boot correctly (it booted half way and then threw out an error). Can anyone tell me what I'm doing wrong ?

Thanks.

Or how about this one:

I have a floppy diskette with Seagate SeaTools 2.07 which is newer than the version on UBCD. It contains these files:

AUTOEXEC.BAT
COMMAND.COM
CONFIG.SYS
HIMEM.EXE
KERNEL.SYS
RDISK.EXE
SEATOOLS.ZIP
SYS.COM
TDSK.EXE
unzip.exe

How do I go about adding this floppy to UBCD ?

Copy the files to a dos folder of the extracted UBCD path (e.g c:\ubcd-extract\ubcd\dos\).

The lilo files can probalby also deleted (for boot menu) But because I can't see the content of them I am not sure.

/custom/custom.cfg

The CONFIG command loads the config file for other CD, with all options as the normal , but it requires a new version of isolinux.
Download syslinux from http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/utils/boot/syslinux/.

Extract the syslinux archive to "c:\syslinux\".

To update isolinux for the CD version
- Copy "c:\syslinux\core\isolinux.bin" to "c:\ubcd-extract\isolinux\".
- Copy "c:\syslinux\com32\menu\menu.c32" to "c:\ubcd-extract\isolinux\".
- Copy "c:\syslinux\com32\modules\chain.c32" to "c:\ubcd-extract\isolinux\"
- Copy "c:\syslinux\memdisk\memdisk" to "c:\ubcd-extract\isolinux\"

To update syslinux for the bootable USB key
- Copy "c:\syslinux\core\ldlinux.sys" to "c:\ubcd-extract\syslinux\".
- Copy "c:\syslinux\mbr\mbr.bin" and "c:\syslinux\ldloader.bss" to "c:\ubcd-extract\tools\ubcd2usb\".
- Copy "c:\syslinux\com32\menu\menu.c32" to "c:\ubcd-extract\syslinux\"
- Copy "c:\syslinux\com32\modules\chain.c32" to "c:\ubcd-extract\syslinux\"
- Copy "c:\syslinux\memdisk\memdisk" to "c:\ubcd-extract\syslinux\"

Make the new iso.
Test it first in a Virtual machine (VirtualBox, qemu, VMware, ...), before burning to see if it works.

Post also the content of the cd.cfg file.


For the Seagate Seatools:
Make a disk image of it, if you don't have the image anymore (name it seatools.img)
Compress it with 7zip or another archiver to gzip format.
Rename the compressed file toseatools.igz.

Delete /images/seatools.igz and place the new file here.

Update the section in /menus/hdd2.cfg.

Thank you very much. I went for Seatools first since it seemed easier. Worked beautifully. I noticed though that floppy image creating tools create the extension *.bif instead of *.img. I changed it to *.img and gzipped it and it worked nonetheless. I was just confused at the start.

I'll try the Recovery CD procedure later.

The cd.cfg from that disc looks like this:

My method won't work. I thought that the cfg file was for isolinux.
Can you post the contents of cd_plg.cfg and lilo.eng?

Or do you have a download link for this iso?

Here are the files: http://css.setti.info/~perplexer/recovery/

The main problem I have understanding how this thing works is that I can't figure out the sequence of files being processes when booting, I don't know which files gets executed first when I boot from the CD. If I knew that I could probably slowly figure it out step by step as files get processed and executed. Is there a good guide somewhere ? I was reading BartPE's page but there's so much stuff there it's overwhelming.

Again, thanks for your efforts.

Can you upload the original iso also, so I can see how it looks when you boot it in an emulator.

Can you give a link to the site from which you have downloaded the image?

Here: http://css.setti.info/~perplexer/recovery.iso

When you boot the ISO in a virtual machine or the cd on a real PC, you see the following:

* Normal Mode (linux)
* Safe Mode (dos)
* Low-Graphics Safe Mode(dos)
* Floppy disk
* Hard disk 0 MBR
* Find OSes on your hard disks

I got the linux part working:
You need only the initrd.gz and vmlinuzp file for it.
Copy them to c:\ubcd-extract\custom\paragon\.

Edit the c:\ubcd-extract\custom\custom.cfg config file:


If it doesn't boot on certain PCs, you can add the noapic parmeter to the append line (press TAB when you want to edit the line on boot time).


If the PC's for which you want to use it, have enough memory (128MB isn't enough to run a program, I think. 256MB should be enough), you only need the linux version.

For the dos part:
It doesn't work (only partly).

Copy the dos.img to c:\ubcd-extract\custom\paragon\.
Put the other files in c:\ubcd-extract\, except for dos.img, initrd.gz and vmlinuzp.

It boots, but it says "Recovey media error".

The emulated floppy doesn't find the CD (memdisk emulates a floppy image).

In the autoexec.bat of dos.img there is a CDDRIVE variable, which is empty by default. I suspect that the CDDRIVE variable gets it value by the cd_plg.exe program.

I tried to make a superfloppy (which contains \dos and the files inside the dos.img), but it didn't boot.
You can try to make a large floppy image yourself (don't know if it will work) and add the following line in autoexec.bat (e.g.: after the 'doslang' line):