Trouble creating IFL boot disk

[ZeroFlight]

This is my first exposure to IFL, so please forgive any noob mistakes.

I'm kind of mixing tech up at the moment so what I want may not even be possible. I'll start with the ideal scenario, which I haven't been able to make work yet. I have a 5tb portable USB drive that I'd like to turn into a portable imager. So ideally I'd have it loaded to boot to IFL and be able to save images to the same drive albeit different partition. Or a subfolder if necessary. I've been able to do it successfully in the past with Acronis and Ghost so figured it shouldn't be too difficult with IFL.

Because of its size, it has to be GPT or lose more than half of its space, though I also tried with MBR anyway. The system sees it as a Basic disk rather than a Removable drive so Makedisk doesn't see it at the end & can't write to it directly from there. So I chose ISO and used Rufus to burn the ISO to the drive (which means no partition but that's ok)(also, Rufus has to format as GPT). That all completes, but when booting it just goes straight to the grub prompt rather than actually booting into IFL.

I tried creating it on a regular 4gb thumb drive (which boots fine), formatting the portable and copying the files from the thumb to it. Ditto creating a small fat32 parition & copying the files but that all give me basic UEFI:NTFS boot errors. I might be able to run IFW and copy partitions that way but don't have a lot of confidence in at this point.

Am I missing something stupidly obvious? Any other ideas? Or is it just not possible?




The system I'm testing on a brand new Dell laptop, so latest firmware and UEFI environment. Fast boot is disabled but I haven't disable SecureBoot or enabled legacy mode yet.

[Brian K]

ZeroFlight,

Create an IFL UFD. Create 200 MB of Free Space on your GPT disk. Boot the IFL UFD and use IFL Copy to copy the IFL partition to the 200 MB Free Space. Now you can use the BIOS Boot menu to boot IFL from the GPT disk.