USB Toolkit v.1 (Hiren’s Boot USB)

Have you ever been in a bind where your PC crashed and you need it to get in to get a file, or a virus got into a friends computer and it was so bad that you couldn’t get into it to run a virus scanner. (Tisk Tisk, shouldn’t be surfing that pron, lol) Well today my friend I’m going to show you how to build a bootable USB tool kit and be able to boot into any PC and be albe to extract files as well as to run a virus scanner, and various other tools from a miniature version of Windows XP. Our baseline for out toolkit will be Hiren’s Boot CD. Lets go ahead and get our hands dirty. (no not like that, god get your head out of the gutter!)

What You Need:
A USB flash dirve (2Gb should be enough)
A copy of USBFormat (available here)
A copy of grub4dos (available here)
A copy of AnytoISO to extract our ISO (available here)
and finally a copy of Hiren's Boot CD (available here)

Formating the USB Flash Drive

ok lets start off by preparing our flash drive and getting it ready to make it bootable.

1. open up USBFormat.exe
2. Make sure under divice your Flash Drive is selected
3. For the filesystem select FAT32
4. Go ahead and give it a volume name (I named mine "Intruder")
5. click on start to go ahead and format the USB Flash Drive (Warning: This will erase will erase everything on your Flash Drive, please back up any important information that my have on it)

(Refrence to the Picture below for guidance)

Setting up Grub4Dos on your Flash Drive

Sweet, now that we have our Flash Drive formatted we can now go ahead and install Grub4Dos on our Flash Drive!

1. Open up grub4dos.exe
2. click on the radio button for disk, select your flash drive from the drop down menu
3. once you have selected your flash drive, click on the refresh button located under the Part List section
4. once refreshed select Whole Disk (MBR) under the part list drop down menu
5. click on install and you are set!

(Reference to the picture below for guidance)

At this point grub4dos will go ahead and edit the grldr file and the menu.lst file located in the directory of grub 4dos. Once completed copy the "grldr" and "menu.lst" over to your flash drive.

Extracting Hirens ISO with AnytoISO

Now that we have configured grub4dos to be compatible with our flash drive and is set as a bootable device, we are now going to extract our toolkit on to the flash drive.

1. Install AnytoISO on your system and follow the on screen instructions to install it
2. once AnytoISO is installed, go ahead and open AnytoISO.exe
3. click on "Open Image" and browse to the directory where you have saved Hirens boot CD
4. select the Hiresn ISO and click open
5. click on select folder and browse over to the root of the flash drive and click ok
6. click on extract (at this point, the files on the ISO will be extracted to the flash drive)
7. Exit out of the AnytoISO application

We are done!!!


Wow, we have finished our creation, you now have a bootable USB Flash Drive loaded with tools to do some serious work. Go ahead and test out your creation. Start up a computer and make sure your Bios is set up to boot from USB (Removable) Devices. (refer to your computers documentation on how to set this up) With this USB toolkit you will be able to change passwords, clone hard drives, boot into a miniature version of Windows XP. Their you will be able to extract files, run virus scans on a system and many, many other things, the tasks are limitless.

Enjoy your creation and let me know what you thing of it in the comments.

Screenshots provided by:

http://www.hiren.info/pages/bootcd

http://www.crystalidea.com/anytoiso