Hiren’s Boot CD with UEFI support

boothirenuefi

I am a long term user of Hiren's Boot CD, but the CD does not support booting on UEFI/EFI/SecureBoot hardware, is there some kind of update/patch to apply to the cd image to be able to boot without BIOS? Can I make this myself? (By putting some files in the iso image?)

Edit: Running Hiren from USB on EFI counts too as an alternative.

To clarify before accepting an answer: I will test the solution on:

  • A EFI computer (SecureBoot enabled)
  • A EFI computer (SecureBoot disabled)

Edit 2:

There are many suggestion to use tools which make an ISO bootable with UEFI on a flash disk, however it's not that easy as you can only do that with UEFI-enabled ISO's. By UEFI enabled ISO's I mean that the ISO files contain a BOOT\EFI directory with a EFI bootloader. Hiren does not have this so the tools will not work. This is why I am asking the question – is there any way to make ourselves / copy another bootloader into HIREN and make it work?

Best Answer

Short answer: No; you cannot make Hiren's Boot CD EFI compatible.

Even when Hiren's uses Syslinux and it is true Syslinux 6.03 now supports UEFI (syslinux.efi) you will face at least 2 problems when upgrading your Hiren's CD to Syslinux 6.03:

  1. syslinux.efi is not an UEFI signed application then forget about the SecureBoot scenario.

  2. Syslinux.efi (as the rest of EFI boot managers) can only boot kernels that were built with certain EFI parameters turned "ON" i.e.

    CONFIG_EFI=y
CONFIG_RELOCATABLE=y 
CONFIG_EFI_PARTITION=y
CONFIG_EFI_VARS=y 
CONFIG_FB_EFI=y

Hiren's kernel is not built with those flags "ON" and you (surely) do not have the exact sources/config for re-building the kernel while adding the above mentioned missing EFI related parameters.

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