[ros-general] ReactOS ISO support has been added in Rufus

[Pete Batard]

Hi,

I'm the author of Rufus [1], and I was pleasantly surprised to see it 
referenced on the ReactOS Live USB creation wiki [2]. So first of all, 
thanks for that.

Now, considering that the documented method of creating a Live USB using 
Rufus can't exactly be qualified as very user-friendly, I have just 
added native support for the ReactOS bootcd/livecd ISOs in Rufus, so 
that you should just be able to point the app to one of those ISOs, and 
it will automatically create a complete bootable USB, with no need to 
download an invoke GRUB4DOS, 7-zip, etc.


If you want to test, you can pick the latest ALPHA from: 
http://rufus.akeo.ie/downloads/


Currently, the way this works is through installing Syslinux (v4.07) and 
mboot.c32 so that setupldr.sys can then be invoked (see the 
/syslinux.cfg created by Rufus on the drive).

Also, for the time being, only setupldr.sys will be referenced (no 
freeldr.sys) on account that:

1. The Syslinux's menu.c32 file is rather large, and I want to keep 
Rufus small, so I don't want to embed it in the application (which is 
also the mais reason why Rufus doesn't include native GRUB support). But 
this means that user selection from a menu is not available.

2. When testing, I couldn't get freeldr.sys to do much when booted from 
USB... though that was most likely because I hadn't actually installed 
ReactOS anywhere.

Also note that, using 61492, even though the process seems to boot OK, 
I wasn't able to get a live ReactOS actually running from USB. On 2 of 
the machines I tried, the boot process eventually failed with "Fatal 
System Error 0x0000007b" in the USB stack. But I also got the exact same 
error with GRUB4DOS when following the steps from the wiki, so I don't 
think this has much to do with Rufus. I haven't really had a chance to 
investigate this issue yet, for lack of time.

Still, I'm hoping that making the creation of a bootable UFD easier for 
ReactOS will help encourage more people to test it and help the project.

Of course, I'm also open to suggestions to try to improve support for 
ReactOS in Rufus, if you want something specific. For instance, I should 
point out that the syslinux.cfg created by Rufus is written before any 
of the ISO files are copied over. Thus, if the ReactOS ISOs were to 
include their own syslinux.cfg & menu.c32/vesamenu.c32, it would be very 
easy to provide menu selection for the user when booting from USB, even 
as the ISOs are not Syslinux/Isolinux based.

Regards,

/Pete

[1] http://rufus.akeo.ie/
[2] 
http://www.reactos.org/wiki/LiveUSB#Installing_the_MBR_.28from_64-bit_Windo…