Hi,
I am trying to create a bootable (and encrypted) USB flash drive using a VHD file.
Here is my configuration:
1- VHD has two parititions: a 350 MB System partition and a 3 GB Boot partition with Windows 8.1 Enterprise installed on it.
2- USB thumb drive's MBR is programmed by Bootice utility to have Grub4Dos bootloader . A menu.lst file helps me to load the VHD using Grub(4dos).
3- To make Grub able to load and boot my VHD, I had to install one of Firadisk or WinVBlock drivers on the Windows 8.1 VHD image.
4- USB drive is formatted as NTFS and has just one active partition.
The system successfully loads and boots this VHD with decent performance through a USB 2.0 port.
The next critical need for me is to encrypt the Boot partition (the 2nd partition) to protect VHD from any tamper or manipulation. So, I used TrueCrypt to encrypt the Windows when it was live and running. TrueCrypt successfully encrypted the system and I made no extra modifications to the overall updated configuration.
To load the encrypted VHD from USB flash drive and boot the computer system by it, I had to chainload the first Grub (residing on flash drive's MBR) to the new Grub installed on VHD' mbr. I also used TrueCrypt rescue image to feed the chainloader of the second grub. This image was put on the VHD's system partition.
The final VHD configuration succeeded when attaching the VHD to a virtual machine created by Oracle VirtualBox software. The OS went live without problem using this VM after TrueCrypt loader asked me the unlock password; but when the process starts independent from any VM, using chainloaded Grubs and using USB Flash drive, system shows a BSOD blue screen with "INACCESSIBLE_BOOT_DEVICE" error code after waiting sometime.
I tried to change the driver to WinVBlock or use another image rather than Rescue Disk Image, but nothing changed. I am surprised why VirtualBox is able to do the job so nice? Maybe it uses some tricky techniques to load and boot the VHD, or it is a problem regarding the use of USB Removable disks to host the VHD file. I noticed a Microsoft article explaining the VHD boot limitations; none of them were about using a VHD boot on a USB device.
I also tested some other encryption software such as DiskCrypt and BestCrypt, but no improvement was made.
Anybody can help me?
Thanks
I am trying to create a bootable (and encrypted) USB flash drive using a VHD file.
Here is my configuration:
1- VHD has two parititions: a 350 MB System partition and a 3 GB Boot partition with Windows 8.1 Enterprise installed on it.
2- USB thumb drive's MBR is programmed by Bootice utility to have Grub4Dos bootloader . A menu.lst file helps me to load the VHD using Grub(4dos).
3- To make Grub able to load and boot my VHD, I had to install one of Firadisk or WinVBlock drivers on the Windows 8.1 VHD image.
4- USB drive is formatted as NTFS and has just one active partition.
The system successfully loads and boots this VHD with decent performance through a USB 2.0 port.
The next critical need for me is to encrypt the Boot partition (the 2nd partition) to protect VHD from any tamper or manipulation. So, I used TrueCrypt to encrypt the Windows when it was live and running. TrueCrypt successfully encrypted the system and I made no extra modifications to the overall updated configuration.
To load the encrypted VHD from USB flash drive and boot the computer system by it, I had to chainload the first Grub (residing on flash drive's MBR) to the new Grub installed on VHD' mbr. I also used TrueCrypt rescue image to feed the chainloader of the second grub. This image was put on the VHD's system partition.
The final VHD configuration succeeded when attaching the VHD to a virtual machine created by Oracle VirtualBox software. The OS went live without problem using this VM after TrueCrypt loader asked me the unlock password; but when the process starts independent from any VM, using chainloaded Grubs and using USB Flash drive, system shows a BSOD blue screen with "INACCESSIBLE_BOOT_DEVICE" error code after waiting sometime.
I tried to change the driver to WinVBlock or use another image rather than Rescue Disk Image, but nothing changed. I am surprised why VirtualBox is able to do the job so nice? Maybe it uses some tricky techniques to load and boot the VHD, or it is a problem regarding the use of USB Removable disks to host the VHD file. I noticed a Microsoft article explaining the VHD boot limitations; none of them were about using a VHD boot on a USB device.
I also tested some other encryption software such as DiskCrypt and BestCrypt, but no improvement was made.
Anybody can help me?
Thanks
Last edited:
My Computer
System One
-
- OS
- Windows 8.1
- Computer type
- PC/Desktop
