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Re: [OCLUG-Tech] multiboot liveCD isos on external HDD

  • Subject: Re: [OCLUG-Tech] multiboot liveCD isos on external HDD
  • From: "Prof J C Nash (U30A)" <nashjc [ at ] uottawa [ dot ] ca>
  • Date: Sat, 16 Mar 2013 21:25:31 -0400
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


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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.




--
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.