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General software and network General OS-independent software and network questions, X11, MTA, routing, etc. |
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Multi-ISO boot
I'm wondering whether it's possible to make a multiboot USB drive without making a separate partition for each distro, but running them from a (bootable) ISO file. In other words, if I wanted to have 20 live distros on the drive, I'd just make two partitions (instead of 1+20), the one for bootloader and the other for containing all the 20 ISOs. Is this possible, theoretically and practically?
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You can't boot/load an ISO file directly, at least, I wasn't able to figure out a way when I looked for it a bunch of years ago. However, you achieve the same effect using syslinux. I created a DOS/WinPE/FreeBSD/Linux/Memtest multiboot drive with syslinux.
Syslinux is a bootloader, like grub. The name is slightly confusing, it doesn't really have anything to do with Linux (the kernel or OS) as such, I believe the name stems from the fact that it was originally written to boot Linux, but it can boot pretty much anything. I also needed to format my USB drive using BOOTICE, I don't quite remember which options worked best, so you'll need to look that up or experiment. Some USB drives may also work out-of-the-box. Using isolinux, you can also make a bootable CD/DVD with this, the only difference is that the config file is named /boot/isolinux/isolinux.cfg It's been a few years since I did this, I believe there's been a major rewrite of syslinux, so this example might not work with the newer version, but it should give you an idea on how to proceed. Also, back then the FreeBSD port of syslinux was seriously broken, I don't know if this is still the case or if it's fixed. Anyway, here's my config: /boot/syslinux/syslinux.cfg Code:
PROMPT 0 TIMEOUT 30 DEFAULT main LABEL main KERNEL /boot/syslinux/menu.c32 APPEND /boot/syslinux/menu.cfg Code:
DEFAULT freedos MENU TITLE Anduril 1.3 # MENU COLOR element ansi foreground background shadow MENU COLOR TITLE 1;37;44 MENU COLOR TABMSG 37;40 MENU MARGIN 2 MENU ROWS 19 MENU TABMSGROW 25 MENU CMDLINEROW 25 MENU HELPMSGROW -1 label freedos MENU LABEL ^1 FreeDOS KERNEL /boot/syslinux/memdisk APPEND initrd=/boot/freedos.gz label freebsd MENU LABEL ^2 FreeBSD #KERNEL /boot/syslinux/mboot.c32 #APPEND /boot/freebsd/kernel --- /boot/freebsd/mfsroot.gz KERNEL /boot/syslinux/memdisk APPEND initrd=/boot/freebsd.gz harddisk raw label parted MENU LABEL ^3 Parted Magic 5.9 LINUX /boot/pmagic/bzImage INITRD /boot/pmagic/initramfs APPEND edd=off noapic load_ramdisk=1 prompt_ramdisk=0 rw vga=791 loglevel=0 max_loop=256 keymap=us directory=/boot/ label win7pe MENU LABEL ^4 Win7PE #KERNEL /boot/loader.bin KERNEL /boot/grub.exe APPEND --config-file="chainloader /boot/BOOTMGR" MENU SEPARATOR label memtest MENU LABEL ^5 Memtest86+ 4.20 KERNEL /boot/memtest label memtest_probe MENU LABEL ^6 Memtest86+ 4.00 Probe method (Might work if the default doesn't) KERNEL /boot/memtest_probe label hpmemtest MENU LABEL ^7 HP Vision Diagnostics Memory Test 1.7 KERNEL /boot/syslinux/memdisk APPEND initrd=/boot/hp_memtest.gz # http://pciids.sourceforge.net/v2.2/pci.ids.gz label hdt MENU LABEL ^8 System Information (HDT) TEXT HELP ENDTEXT KERNEL /boot/syslinux/hdt.c32 MENU SEPARATOR LABEL hdd1 MENU LABEL ^9 Boot first hard disk LOCALBOOT 0x81
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UNIX was not designed to stop you from doing stupid things, because that would also stop you from doing clever things. |
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Thank you Carpetsmoker, it does do the thing! Even though it's been my first experience with syslinux which in fact didn't go down too well.. could you please show me your menu.c32 too? Cause I couldn't activate the boot menu and it just booted straight into the default option.
I made 2 memory stick versions of ISO installs of NetBSD-6.0.1 and ..-6.1.1 via mkmemstick in order to try them on my old eMachines netbook, so I used them on that USB drive. To my disappointment none of them could load further than their internal boot menu. |
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I've tried to boot a few other OS images with Syslinux (non-BSD) and they worked fine (among them KolibriOS, booted in 2-3 seconds, fantastic!). It seems to me that the root of the above-mentioned problem might be that for some reasons NetBSD images don't play well together with Syslinux, that's the conclusion I've come to.
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The grub.cfg entry would look similar to the following: Code:
menuentry "Ubuntu Live" { set root=(hd0,7) loopback loop /ubuntu-11.04-desktop-amd64.iso linux (loop)/casper/vmlinuz boot=casper iso-scan/filename=/ubuntu-11.04-desktop-amd64.iso noeject noprompt -- initrd (loop)/casper/initrd.lz } |
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