Plop Boot Manager v5.0

Plop Boot Manager v5.0

he Plop Boot Manager is a small program to boot different operating systems. The boot manager has a built-in ide cdrom and usb driver to access that hardware without the help/need of a bios. You can boot the operating systems from hard disk, floppy, CD/DVD or from USB. You can start the boot manager from floppy, CD, network and there are many more ways to start the boot manager. You can install the boot manager on your hard disk. There is no extra partition required for the boot manager.

If your PC or Laptop is old and  doesn't support USB Booting you can use this tool to boot and install OS from a bootable USB drive. 

If your old PC Bios supports  USB 1.0 or USB 1.1 and you are installing OS through a pendrive then the process will be very slow.  In other words if you have USB 2.0 hardware BUT a USB 1.1 BIOS, you may want to try PLoP. This also speeds up the BIOS USB speed on some computers. Some computers only run at USB 1.1 speed during the boot process even though they have USB 2.0 capability. But PLoP loads a USB 2.0 driver that is used instead of the USB 1.1.

• USB boot without BIOS support (UHCI, OHCI and EHCI)
• CD/DVD boot without BIOS support (IDE)
• PCMCIA CardBus support to enable boot from USB PC-Cards
• Floppy boot
• Different profiles for operating systems
• Define up to 16 partitions
• No extra partition for the boot manager
• Hidden boot, maybe you have a rescue system installed and the user should not see that there is another system installed
• Boot countdown
• Hide partitions
• Password protection for the computer and the boot manager setup
• Backup of partition table data
• Textmode user interface 80x50
• Graphical user interface 640x480, 800x600, 1024x786, 1280x1024
• MBR partition table edit
• Start of the boot manager from harddisk, floppy, USB, CD, DVD
• Starting from Windows boot menu
• Starting from LILO, GRUB, Syslinux, Isolinux, Pxelinux (network)
• It can be used as PCI option ROM in your BIOS
• Access the whole USB hard disk (up to 2TB) even when the bios has a 128 GiB limit
• You can run the boot manager over the network
• Start the networkcard bootrom from the boot manager to boot from the network

http://www.plop.at/en/bootmanagers.html

http://www.plop.at/en/bootmanager/download.html

Click on image to enlarge.

There is also a tool which make use of Plop and can do the whole process more easily. Visit the following site for more details :

http://www.msfn.org/board/topic/140412-release-siginets-plop-usb-boot-manager-installer/

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Older computers that can't boot from usb - The howto guide

Before the actual technique, some details...

Most of the older computers cant boot from usb (pen drives or memory cards, ext hdd) because of the bios (basic input output system) limitations. This is because the older bios do not contain the usb drivers. So at the time of booting the usb drives are not recognized.

Generally, drivers are automatically loaded during boot process from 4 sources -
From bios itself
From addon cards or daughter cards (if additional bios is present)
From system disk or hard disk where we additionally install it after os installation
From os itself (win 7 itself has most of drivers)

If any device attached to computer requires driver, which is not present, will not work properly
So in this case the usb device do not get drivers from old bios and if you have to boot it then you have to provide it all the required usb drivers from some other source.

The easy and simple method to do this is to use the plop boot cd which contains required usb drivers for boot process to complete.

The technique -
Download plpbt-5.0.11-2.zip  from http://www.plop.at/en/bootmanager.html

Extract it to get the iso file plpbt.iso (can extract using 7zip http://www.7-zip.org/download.html )
Then burn iso file using any cd/dvd burning software like nero. This will be a bootable cd.

Now attach the usb device (containing any kind of  os for installation purpose or live environment) to the usb port of the computer (that doesn't support usb booting) and then boot it  from cd you just created.

Nearly every older pc bios contains cd drivers so cd booting in older pc is not a problem.

After booting from cd you will get a screen that shows the plop boot manager.
Then you will get a menu that has some options to choose from. There you have to choose the usb option.
When you select the usb option there, the usb drivers will be automatically loaded for bios and the usb device will get detected by bios. After that the usb device will start booting. then you can eject the tray and take out the cd. This will not effect the usb boot process.

The plop boot manager do not permanently change or modify the bios. It is a temporary process. That means in future if you have to boot from usb  device again then you have to repeat the whole process.

If the usb device do not boot with this process the check the device itself. May be the pendrive itself is not bootable or there something wrong in the os that is inside the usb.
In that case again prepare your pendrive properly and try again.

You can mail me to abhi.82@aol.in

Please  post any  suggestions or comments.