[LUAU] Lots of boot disks on one USB drive

Jeff Mings jeffm at lava.net
Sun Dec 16 01:11:16 PST 2012


Hi All!

     I finally got around to trying one of the tools for setting several 
distros / CDs / DVDs on one USB drive.  MultiBootUSB seems to work 
fairly well, but has some setup gotchas:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/multibootusb/

If you're sick of carrying around 8 different flash drives, try it - 
once you get it working, it's pretty cool.  Here are some things I'd 
like to pass on:
-If you use Ubuntu 12.04 (it's my desktop distro of choice) ,  you won't 
be able to install the .DEB file because it needs Gabbas3, which is not 
in the repositories.  You can easily get it from the Launchpad 
repository with:  sudo add-apt-repository ppa:nemh/gambas3 .

-Once you install and run the (mostly) GUI tool, know that you are 
expected to add one distro to the given USB device at a time.  Also, for 
some reason, it didn't like the auto mount-point.  As root, I unmounted 
the USB drive, mounted it in a subdirectory of /media that I made, and 
then ran the tool with gbr3 /usr/bin/multibootusb.gambas .

-Finally, you will need to tell it to install syslinux on the USB drive 
and then edit the syslinux.cfg file for everything to work.  I added my 
own set of directives to the beginning of multibootusb/syslinux.cfg :

UI /syslinux/vesamenu.c32
default Ubuntu-SecureRemix-12_10-64bit <label of distro to start by default>
PROMPT 0
TIMEOUT 200
ONTIMEOUT Ubuntu-SecureRemix-12_10-64bit

Finally, after all of that, it works.  And it's pretty cool.

Good luck,
-Jeff



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