ISO booting with ZM-VE300

[cyberjock]

In IRC over the last week there's been talk about the Zalman ZM-VE300. I ordered one from Newegg(about $40). There's several versions, the VE200, VE300, and VE400.

VE200 - First generation. Offers both USB2.0 and eSATA
VE300 - Second generation. Offers USB3.0 only(obviously backwards compatible with older USB versions)
VE400 - Third generation. Adds AES-256 bit encryption with a pad to enter the "PIN" to unlock the drive.

The VE200 had some issues with some people, but otherwise was a rather solid product. It was limited to USB2 and eSATA though.

The VE300 has some people complaining about the USB3.0 port failing in less than a year and basically won't work except as a USB2 device. It could be a problem for some. Personally, I use USB2 mostly because many OSes don't like USB3 and will crash when booting from USB3. So while I do care about the USB3 functionality, its not a deal-breaker for me.

The VE400 adds encryption. Review on Newegg and Amazon have lead me to believe that this may not be the best product as some people complained about the difficulty in entering the PIN on the pad. If something happens and the number buttons break apparently you will be unable to enter the PIN and therefore unable to access your data...forever. Not a particularly great idea in my opinion. If I want encryption I think something like Truecrypt might be a good alternative for some. Note that if you do FDE with Truecrypt you obviously won't be able to boot ISOs anymore.

So, with those drawbacks I went with the VE300.

First thing I did was update the firmware on the device. You have 2 options(both are the same version # but offer different file systems to boot from). You get to choose between an NTFS firmware and an exFAT/FAT32 firmware. I chose NTFS since it supports >4GB support and is better supported under Linux than exFAT. I couldn't find a way to determine the firmware version my device had, but I figured I'd update it to NTFS and then I'd know it was up to date.

My test machine was an i7-870k based system with 8GB of RAM and both USB2 and USB3 ports. For testing purposes I used USB2 since many OSes do not properly boot from USB3 devices. All you have to do is power on your computer and go to your boot menu(F12 for my motherboard). Then you choose your ISO from the jog switch on the hard drive caddy and select it. Then choose to "boot from USB-CDROM" on your computer and you are done. Very simple and very useful.

Here's the operating systems(ISOs) I tested that worked:

Acronis 2011 Home BootCD
Acronis 2014 Home BootCD
Active KillDisk 4.1
Clonezilla Live 2.2.0-31 x64
FreeBSD 9.2-RELEASE x64 DVD
FreeBSD 10.0 RC5 x64 DVD
FreeNAS 9.2.0 RELEASE x64 Installation CD
Gparted Live 0.17.0-4 64-bit
Kaspersky Rescue Disk 10
Linux Mint 16 Cinnamon DVD 64-bit
O&O Diskimage 6.8.1 Pro
O&O Diskimage 7 Pro
PC-BSD 9-STABLE x64 DVD
Parted Magic version dated June 15, 2013(last free edition)
Parted Magic version dated Nov 11, 2013
Seagate Seatools 2.23
Symantec Endpoint Recovery Tool 2.0.24
Windows 7 32 and 64-bit Universal Installation DVDs
Windows 8 32 and 64-bit Installation DVDs
Windows 8.1 32 and 64-bit Installation DVDs
Windows Home Server 2011
Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1 installation CD
Windows Server 2008 x86 SP2
Windows Server 2012 Installation DVDs
Windows Server 2012 R2 Installation DVDs

Here's the operating systems(ISOs) I tested that didn't work:

HawkPE 4.3 - Presumably this is because the ISO is based on Windows XP and XP doesn't support live booting from USB media. I didn't test this further as I have never used this disk but someone requested I test this ISO. It appears to be some kind of BartPE disk.

So, it appears that the emulation of this device is excellent as the only OS that didn't work wouldn't normally work anyway since it doesn't support USB booting.

Overall, I consider this a very useful tool for those that regularly need to install OSes. This emulates a CD-ROM as hardware, so any OS that is hard to boot from with an emulated CD drive is likely to work just fine.

I normally have a USB stick that uses GRUB4DOS to boot my many OSes. However as of late many OSes do not like booting from emulated CD-ROM drives that are software-based necessitating the need for an alternate option. With this I plan to use my USB stick for booting DOS and some ISOs and this Zalman ZM-VE300 for other ISOs that do not operate properly with the CD-ROM emulation provided by GRUB4DOS.

I would like to add a few things:

1. If you are installing OSes for people regularly(or booting from LiveCDs regularly) there is no substitute for using solid state media for your source media. I can install Windows 7 to my test machine(with an Intel SSD) in less than 10 minutes! I can literally go from powering on the machine to sitting at the desktop of the admin user account with Windows 7 fully installed(minus updates of course) in less than 10 minutes.

2. If you plan to use USB2.0 you may need to use one of those Y-adapters to give you extra power to your 2.5" hard drive caddy. But if you use an SSD they use so little power that you should always be able to boot with any standard USB2 or USB3 cable. Big win for me as I hate those Y-adapters and they don't always work very well.

3. If you start using SSDs or USB thumbdrives for installing Windows and/or Linux you will find your install times will decrease rapidly. Even on USB2. This is because the latency is virtually non-existent. There really isn't a pressing need for throughput from the installation media as much as there is low-latency.

So what am I saying? In short:

1. Use an SSD! Makes booting and installing MUCH faster and no stupid USB Y-adapter will be needed. Remember, even a 60GB SSD is a boatload of ISOs!
2. Don't worry if you are limited to USB2 speeds. You won't notice the difference!

The only thing I wish I could do would be to boot DOS from ISO, then access the drive. It would be very handy for flashing BIOSes and firmware. Unfortunately, NTFS isn't supported on DOS. Guess you can't have everything in life...

 

[JohnK]

Thanks Cyberjock, great writeup. My order is placed!

 

[cyberjock]

I'm trying to see if I can find some way to boot DOS with NTFS support to access the drive itself if you are in the "dual mode". Not sure if its possible, but I'm hopeful!

I'd love to be able to boot from a DOS ISO, then go to the hard drive and flash my BIOS or M1015 firmware or whatever I need to do from there. We'll see if I can figure out a way.

 

[cyberjock]

And I did try a sort of "hackjob" with 2 partitions. Fail. Apparently the ZM-VE300 doesn't handle dual partition very well. ;)

If you could do FAT32 and handle the 4GB file limit I suppose its doable. But as I want NTFS because I do have >4GB ISOs I guess its safe to say I'll have to carry around a USB stick and this USB drive for what I want to do. Oh well.

 

[joeschmuck]

Have you tried "NTFS Reader for DOS"? I did a Google search "dos ntfs support" and found a few ways you might achieve your goal but I haven't tested them out.

P.S. When do you predict you will hit 10,000 posts?

 

[cyberjock]

Well, part of the problem is you can't boot DOS from NTFS itself apparently. So then I tried doing a second FAT32 partition that was just a few GB at the end of the disk. Since the firmware on the ZM-VE300 uses the first partition I figured this would be safe. Well, it appears that what happens at bootup is it hides the NTFS partition(ok.. no big deal anyway) but the FAT32 partition starts its boot sequence, but then immediately says grldr is missing(grub4dos boot file). It most certainly is there.

So it seems its not going to work.

 

[joeschmuck]

So you aren't trying to boot a DOS iso image? I thought that was your goal so you could flash things. Or is it you cannot access the ZM-VE300 drive area?

So can you boot a DOS iso image?
If so, can you create a custom DOS iso with NTFS Reader for DOS and boot that, then see if you have access to your media?
And worst case would be to create a custom DOS iso with all your files in it as well. Keep a copy on your main computer so you could rebuild as needed. It's not ideal but it would work.

 

[cyberjock]

I was wanting to boot DOS to the command line and be able to access the hard drive.

DOS has no USB drivers to mount the hard drive so booting from a DOS ISO and then accessing the drive isn't going to work.(I did this

Booting DOS as a primary partition won't work because DOS won't boot from NTFS(afaik).

Booting DOS as a secondary partition didn't work(presumably since the Zalman box firmware wasn't expecting you to do 2 partitions).

I wasn't wanting to do a custom DOS ISO as I might go to a friend's house and need a DOS boot disk. I didn't want to have to edit an ISO every time I use it or do anything like that. I wanted to be able to just throw the files on the drive and go. And some ISOs won't let you go over a certain size while still being "bootable". Last I read on it years ago it had to do with the dozens of specs for CDs and how some conflict or something like that. I know I tried to add a 40MB file to a DOS ISO and it wouldn't boot. Take the 40MB file out and it'll suddenly boot. Forum searches at that time turned up to be how the ISO was constructed and would require considerable work to rewrite.

 

[joeschmuck]

Actually this doesn't sound very difficult to me but maybe the toy you have just won't let it all work for you. The alternate thing to do is use a DOS bootable flash drive with your files on it. It does mean you need to bring it along as well but it may be your only solution. I still can't think of a reason you cannot at least get the DOS iso image working and load it with NTFS for DOS, and USB drivers. The trick might be finding a driver for your gizmo if it will not use the default DOS USB driver.

I'd start with Windoze XP DOS bootable image.

 

[TheSmoker]

I have the VE300 for a year now with no issues on usb3. I bought it with some friends in a batch of 5. 2 of them are used daily as part of a big company for IT support purposes and no issues until now. Very useful when you want to get rid of pendrive linux and it's issues with booting freebsd...

Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk HD

 

[Savage]

I am so thread bumping but I would like to blab on VE300 awesomeness.

- There is an alternative firmware on zalman's site for the VE300 that allows you to use exFAT instead of NTFS.

- Apparently there are multi-partition workarounds as well but I have never tried them.

- Also check the power usage on SSDs before using them. ~bzzzt~ the bridge board is somewhat delicate.