replace Express Gate with UNR on alternate power button

[Hansmc]

No one interested?

I am interested. I was think I would have time to try it out on my Asus Eee some time soon but have not done so yet. I was wondering if I could just make the C:\ExpressGate\menu.lst load the windows operating system on the c: drive. That way I would not have to use grub4dos. Then the other power button would just keep on loading the grub from the mbr, and I could turn off the prompt and have that grub just load Ubuntu.

[Nohajc]

You mean you would switch the buttons?
EG button -> Windows
Power button -> Ubuntu

Clever, I haven't thought of that...
I'll try to test it in VirtualBox and see what happens.

[Nohajc]

Ok well, in VirtualBox it just freezes like everything else except grub4dos...
I tried

title minik
   rootnoverify (hd0)
   chainloader +1

But that doesn't necessarily mean it couldn't work on the real hardware.
You'll have to try for yourself.

[levrin]

I'm not running Ubuntu on my 1215B, but I have successfully gotten grub4dos to chainload grub on Mageia installed on an SD card in the built-in cardreader when using the Express Gate button. I should probably switch to a distro with proper UEFI support, so I can see what efibootmgr tells me about the system.

[Nohajc]

Yes, you're right. Using grub4dos it works. I just got my 1215B yesterday and have successfully managed to chainload arch linux.

Just a note: Express Gate came installed in a hidden fat32 partition (no C:\Express Gate on the windows boot partition) but the rest remains the same.

[gcorreai]

I have a UL30Vt and it came with the Splashtop based Express Gate. It seems I'm not able to install Express Gate Cloud on my laptop, or that I'm not using the correct installer. Anyway, I've been tinkering with my installation (which is in a hidden partition called RECOVERY) to, at least, being able to change the screen resolution, which by default doesn't match the native one for my screen. I have failed every time.

Can you help me in any way? I've been trying to replace Express Gate with ChromiumOS (even if it seems to not support my wifi card at the moment), and have read possibly everything there is on the internet on this topic in the past week. This post seems as the biggest achievement, so congratulations on that.

I apologise for my english. I am really frustrated with this thing, so please help me!

[levrin]

So since I've got chainloading working on my 1215B, I'm trying to figure out just how much of the rest of the gig-and-a-half of stuff in the ExpressGate folder can be deleted. Near as I can tell, for booting it just looks for /ExpressGate/stage2 on any ntfs partition, so how much do I really need to keep in there besides that and menu.lst?

Edit: Turns out I don't need any of it besides stage2 and menu.lst, so I moved those and grub4dos onto the main windows partition and deleted the hidden recovery partition it used to be on. Still chainloads correctly.

[Nohajc]

levrin: Thank you for this information. I was curious about this myself but so far have been too lazy to actually do the research.

Anyway, what was driving me crazy about the boot was that there seemed to be an unnecessary step when grub4dos was loading its built-in default menu for about 1 second before redirecting to the linux partition. I just didn't like to see it there every time.

So, I eventually figured out a way to get rid of it completely by patching grub.exe and effectively inserting my own menu.lst in it which by the way eliminates the need of an external menu.lst file.

Yes, the default menu is built into the binary itself but can be replaced by other plain text boot entries without any problem.

This is a script I wrote for the task (it will probably work only with grub4dos version 0.4.4 since the absolute offsets may be different in other versions):

#!/bin/bash

g=grub.exe # grub
og=grub.exe.bak # grub backup
mn=menu.lst # menu file to embed

mv $g $og
dd if=$og ibs=1 count=230018 > $g
cat $mn >> $g
dd if=$og ibs=1 skip=230567 >> $g

Now it looks nice!

gcorreai: I'm sorry, I wish I could help but the problem is that no one actually understands how Splashtop boots so far. I can't even test it in virtual environment, it just won't work, so the chances I can crack this are very slim...
However, earlier in this thread there are links to the phoronix forum where they're hacking Splashtop and some of the darkstar2000's posts about kexec booting look promising.
It wouldn't be the cleanest solution since you would be loading your distro from an already running Splashtop but it is possible according to him. It's just that there is no simple step-by-step howto so you'll have to study more on the subject if you want to understand it.

[gcorreai]

ok, thanks a lot! I've already read the phoronix forum posts but it was not what I was looking for. Replacing Spalshtop with EGC would have been a good solution, but it won't install on my UL30Vt.

Anyway, thanks for the help.

[liuyanghejerry]

Well, the grub4dos method not worked for my Asus N50S. I didn't use the combination file, but only put grub.exe, grldr and a menu.lst at C:/, write a new menu.lst into the hidden partition.

Sadly, when booting, the screen only has a cursor at the left top. Nothing happens after.

I'm not sure why but maybe because my Ubuntu is at a usb2.0 hard drive. Any suggestions, please?

Thanks, anyway.

EDIT: I've got everything fine. I wrote the root wrong in the original menu.lst to the hidden partition. Now I can 2nd init to my ubuntu. Than you very much.