Summary of what I've found.
Note that I was trying to work with a fairly old 40GB IDE (PATA) drive
in a NextStar case. 2.5", powered by USB with Y cable to get extra
power. I suspect a lot of the issues I've encountered are that BIOS code
does not always handle boot from USB HDD as well as USB Flash is
treated. I had much more success with 8GB Kingston Traveller.
My prep machine was a Desktop (6 Core AMD etc.) or an Asus UL30A. If
Linux, then Mint Mate 13. On Asus also tried real Win 7 with YUMI with
not much joy. Tried booting on Asus Eee900 or Asus Eee1005A. (The
desktop does not boot USB for some reason, which I suspect is BIOS
update needed, even though only 1.5 years old.)
1) YUMI did not work for me under Wine. It "almost" does, but I could
not get the USB drive mounted in the YUMI dialog.
2) YUMI on WinXP in Oracle VirtualBox (not OSE version) seemed to be
working, but seems to fail when writing. Maybe VBox USB issue.
3) YUMI with real Win7 -- worked for one distro. Haven't tried adding.
This is, of course, a non-starter ultimately, since I want to
work in Linux.
4) SARDU has similar failures on wine and VBox. I liked the dialog box
better than YUMI, but the install tried to "add" all kinds of crap to my
machine such as games and stuff. In "real" windows my antivirus kicked
up a big storm. I may need to reinstall the winXP virtual machine.
5) (closest to success). Multisystem (http://liveusb.info/dotclear/ --
in French) is Linux based. A bit clunky at times, but it seems to work,
and even managed once (out of three tries) to do so with the HDD. No
woes with the Kingston key.
Note that the resulting drives are not perfect -- menus hard to figure
out sometimes.
I think I'll use the HDD for iso's and then run them in VBox.
JN
On 13-03-15 07:57 PM, Aidan Van Dyk wrote:
So I found the USB pendrive, and the boot stuff on it is called YUMI.
It looks like it's from pendrive linux...
The link google found me is:
http://www.pendrivelinux.com/yumi-multiboot-usb-creator/
I'm not sure how I installed it, I certainly didn't use windows or wine
when i made mine...
But basically, it's a syslinux boot on USB, and it uses chain loading
and grub chained to boot other things, like hard drives, or complete ISO
images fond in a directory....
a.
On Wed, Mar 13, 2013 at 9:02 AM, Aidan Van Dyk <aidan [ at ] highrise [ dot ] ca
<mailto:aidan [ at ] highrise [ dot ] ca>> wrote:
I have a setup like that on a 16GB usb key. I forget the name, but
it was a pretty basic syslinux based boot, and it would scan a
directory for ISOs and present them all as "boot options". It "just
worked" on the computers I tested it on, I used it mainly for
debian-live and for debian-testing-netinstall images...
I can't remember the name now, but I'll try and remember when I get
home to check the key...
On Tue, Mar 12, 2013 at 10:35 PM, Prof J C Nash (U30A)
<nashjc [ at ] uottawa [ dot ] ca <mailto:nashjc [ at ] uottawa [ dot ] ca>> wrote:
THanks. I'd thought of the XXXLinux approaches, but have only
used them for individual images (and frankly used them but did
not learn much how
they work). I should probably look further into it.
However, by using archivemount I found the name of the initrd
and kernel for TinyCore-current and got it to boot with grub2.
So far no joy with gparted iso. The hint came from a page
http://www.pendrivelinux.com/__boot-multiple-iso-from-usb-__via-grub2-using-linux/
<http://www.pendrivelinux.com/boot-multiple-iso-from-usb-via-grub2-using-linux/>
However, they show a grub.cfg file with lots of different setups
for different iso's, and it looks like they change with the
flavour of the month of each distro.
If I figure out the "rules" I'll try to write them up and post a
link here. In the meantime, if anyone is interested in sharing
the investigation, contact me off list. This is obviously not
top of the todo list, but it struck me as a nice way to have
iso's bootable, including the boot-repair disks.
Best, JN
On 13-03-12 10:18 PM, Richard Guy Briggs wrote:
On Tue, Mar 12, 2013 at 06:36:14PM -0400, Prof J C Nash
(U30A) wrote:
I've an old 40G 2.5" drive from a dead laptop that is in
a USB case.
My thought was to use it for holding a bunch of .iso
images of
liveCDs. However, I've had no joy trying to set up
booting of these.
Multisystem "sort of" worked once. Seems glitchy, and
attached to
different systems had different behaviour.
Gujin (following some suggested approaches on net) did
not fire up.
Grub seems needs an interface to the isos, and
instructions I found
seemed to suggest I could simply specify the isos in the
grub.cfg,
which failed when I tried. (The recipe I tried was not
clear if it
wanted grub or grub2, and I suspect therein lies some of the
trouble.)
Has anyone done something like this. I'd be happy to get
some
advice, get it working and write a 1-pager. I've rather
put the isos
on an external drive than burn them to cd/dvd.
Peter Anvin's SYSLINUX or ISO LINUX would be the way I'd go.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/__SYSLINUX
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SYSLINUX>
http://www.syslinux.org/wiki/__index.php/The_Syslinux_Project <http://www.syslinux.org/wiki/index.php/The_Syslinux_Project>
I'm already using pxelinux on my network to boot a number of
distributions.
Cheers, JN
slainte mhath, RGB
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command like a king,
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--
Aidan Van Dyk Create like a god,
aidan [ at ] highrise [ dot ] ca <mailto:aidan [ at ] highrise [ dot ] ca>
command like a king,
http://www.highrise.ca/ work like a
slave.