[GTALUG] question -- how to boot from USB with multiple ISOs?

[William Park]

I'm replying via Yahoo web, so sorry about formatting... text option is nowhere to be found. 

A solution that almost worked is "memdisk" from Syslinux.  Essentially, you configure the usual "syslinux.cfg", but your kernel is "memdisk" and your initrd is the ISO image you want.  I say "almost worked", because    - it boots the ISO you want -- you see dots filling up the screen
    - ISO boots -- you see its boot splash
    - then, it complains that it can't find the live filesystem that it just loaded.
All other solutions I tried or read about, extracts ISO and puts the content into partition.  That's not what I want.  Also, you forget which partition is what OS, and end up putting new release ISO into wrong partition.I want to keep the downloaded ISO as is.
Old ISO designed for pure CD/DVD will not boot off USB, because it doesn't have harddisk emulation layer.  You can tell by 'fdisk -l'.  If it shows partition, then it has harddisk emulation.  You can turn those old ISO into bootable ISO using 'isohybrid', but this modifies the ISO file.
Nowdays, all Linux/Windows ISO can boot off USB.  You can even install Windows onto USB stick and boot off it, but few things doesn't work, like "Windows Update". :-)

Still looking...  Heck, time I spent on this, it would be cheaper to just buy a pack of USB sticks.
-- 
William

     On Tuesday, September 29, 2015 9:42 AM, D. Hugh Redelmeier <hugh at mimosa.com> wrote:
   

| And the dd of one ISO also only works in the case that it is actually
| and image capable of working from USB instead of a CD/DVD, which is
| certainly true for many these days but is also not generic.

I have found that creating bootable USB sticks from dd-ing .iso files
to work very well for those distros that intend it.

This mechanism doesn't allow you to store other goodies on the stick.

I would like to have a convenient place to store my customization
data: some packages I always install, some updates to avoid repeated
fetching from the internet, some public keys, etc.  Only the
unetbootin-like processes seem to support this. 
  
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