MultiBooting Linux distros and System Utilities

[John Gray]

This information may be of use for someone wanting to test/use, all together on a single USB Flash Drive, with the required one selected at boot time from a menu system:
* a variety of Linux distros,
* and/or utilities such as Memtest86+, DBAN, Offline NT Password + Reg Editor, GPartEd, Hiren's Boot CD, assorted AV "rescue disks", etc,

As part of my quest to create a multibooting external USB hard disk from within Windows, I have found a few programs (YUMI, XBoot, SARDU) which will create a multibooting USB Flash Drive from within Windows.

The only one I have used so far is YUMI, which basically allows you to stack up as many burnt-to-disk ISOs as you have room on your USB Flash Drive. (I have three variants of Linux Mint 13 plus MemTest86+ on my 3.8 GB drive).

You simply run the YUMI program, and it asks you to make very sure you've supplied the drive letter of the Flash Drive you want to overwrite. You then add ISO distributions from its (quite extensive and frequently-updated) list - see the "List of Installable Linux Live Distributions" near the bottom of that web page - and point to the ISO you downloaded earlier, or ask it to download the one you've want. It "burns" the ISO to the flash drive, and sets up a cfg file and a menu entry. The burning is quite slow, but this hardly matters. You then select another ISO, and so on until you've put as many on the flash drive as you want, or which will fit. You boot the USB Flash Drive, and the menu system asks which ISO or utility you want to load, and it loads the one selected. To choose another, you exit from the current system, and the PC/laptop reboots, and you're back at the menu again.

[StuartR]

Sounds very useful. Could it also be used to boot my Acronis recovery environment, or does it only have a fixed list of ISO files that it understands?

[John Gray]

I suppose the preliminary question is whether your Acronis recovery environment is provided in the form of an ISO. If not, no option.

As far as I can tell there's no obvious option to 'burn' an arbitrary ISO to UFD, because YUMI needs to set up menu entries and CFG files, and I don't see a way of providing these. However, quoting from the website:
"The distro uninstaller works great, but unlisted ISOs that have been added must currently be manually removed! Also note that not all Unlisted ISOs can be booted (thus adding unlisted ISOs is an unsupported option)."

Anyway, would you want to multiboot an Acronis recovery environment with other ISOs? There are lots of ways of 'burning' a single ISO to a USB Flash Drive.

[StuartR]

...Anyway, would you want to multiboot an Acronis recovery environment with other ISOs? There are lots of ways of 'burning' a single ISO to a USB Flash Drive.

True. But I was thinking that it would be useful to create a general recovery USB with a selection of tools. (Acronis provides a downloadable ISO recovery image, so you can always have the latest device drivers in the recovery environment).

[John Gray]

A bit more work on YUMI shows that, if you tick the "Show ALL drives" tick-box, you can select an attached external USB hard drive and download/install bootable ISOs to it in the same way as to a USB Flash Drive.

There seems to be no practical limit to the number of bootable ISOs you can install, other than disk space and ISP download data caps!

[DollyP]

I have been using XBoot for some time and have been very happy with it. It has the option of using iso's other than those it has links for. You can also amend some of the details so that utilities appear in different sub-menus on boot.

David