Easy Bootloader for USB Thumb Drives

bootgruboperating systemusb-flash-drive

Are there any bootloaders designed for usb drives that make it easy to boot multiple distributions and utilities.

I've installed sysrescuecd, supergrub, ultimate boot cd and other various linux distros on my usb drive. The lame thing is all their installation instructions make it the only thing that boots from your drive, and usb drives can store alot more than one utility.

So I was wondering if anybody has made and easy application to setup a multiboot environment on a usb drive.

Thanks

Best Answer

I like using grub for my multiboot USB devices. grub4dos was not reliable enough in my tests. Isolinux/syslinux work fine but aren't as flexible as grub.

It's pretty simple to extend the menu.lst/grub.cfg either statically as well as on-demand (thanks to tab completion in the grub shell :)). grml2usb of grml.org should give you an idea how to get a working multiboot USB setup.

Tip: grub2 brings a nice feature known as 'loopback'. Using the loopback module/option it's possible to directly boot an (iso9660) ISO without having to manually extract kernel/initrd/.... from it. The following snippet is a configuration example for the grml Linux Live system:

menuentry "grml-rescue system - ISO = grml-small_2009.05.iso" {
  loopback loop (hd0,1)/grml/grml-small_2009.05.iso
  linux    (loop)/boot/grmlsmall/linux26 findiso=/grml/grml-small_2009.05.iso boot=live quiet vga=791 noeject noprompt
  initrd   (loop)/boot/grmlsmall/initrd.gz
}
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