multibooting off a USB drive

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PopeKevinI

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Mar 25, 2002
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I need to find a way to boot a number of options off a USB drive. (and quickly, I was told to have it done today if possible...yeah, right). My first thought was to use GRUB, and I'm going to have to give myself a crash course in whatever it is I use.

Here's a short list of what we'll be doing:
various diagnostic utilities, including memtest and DOS-based HDD diagnostics
At least three DOS boot disks for running ghost images
I'd like to include a basic Linux LiveCD package, probably DSL.

Most of those can be run off ISOs if grub can most and use those. The exception would be the Ghost disks, which use DOS-based drivers to scan for a number of NICs and at some part of that process writes to the disk (we know this because it fails to work off a CD for this reason)

Is grub the best (or at least simplest) choice for what I'm looking to do? Can someone give me some good resources for making a quick start of this, so I can at least have a significant start on the project even if it's not finished after a few hours? A lot of docs I'm finding are rather tedious and would take hours of reading to get me started; I'll do it if I have to, but I'd rather get a walkthrough on some of what I need and go back and fill in the gaps later when I'm not under the gun for some results.
 
You need to upgrade your googling skills...searching for "GRUB on usb" gave me this.

It sounds like what you are trying to do or at least really close to it. Let me know if it works out.
 
Xailia said:
You need to upgrade your googling skills...searching for "GRUB on usb" gave me this.

It sounds like what you are trying to do or at least really close to it. Let me know if it works out.
Click to expand...

That skims over quite a bit of information that I need :(

edit: I'm presently booted off a DSL livecd and trying to do this from that system. I'm not finding any of the stage files they talk about. I have no idea where to go from here. Grr.
 
Xailia said:
what info do you need?
Click to expand...

Specifically, I'm trying to do this (currently) from a DSL LiveCD. The system I'm doing it on does not have direct internet access (our firewall isn't crazy about non-Windows systems at the moment, I'm working on getting that changed), but I can download and burn anything I need to compile to get this to work.

Once I get grub on the drive I think that first article you linked will have the information I need, but it assumes too much in the instructions on installing grub so that I'm stuck when my system didn't look just like his.

I don't know enough about grub yet to know why, but "find" doesn't seem to do much of anything on this system. Maybe it has to do with the livecd, I don't know.

I'm presently booting another system off an Ubuntu livecd to try this in another distro. I tried installing Gentoo this morning, that was a waste of time. The CD wouldn't let me install because x crashed and it didn't fail over to a text-only installer. You'd think such installers would be tolerant of errors by now :(
 
okay, I was able to make a grub boot floppy for DSL that grub's shell found stage1 on, but now I can't get it to "find" anything on the USB drive so that I can identify it under grub's naming scheme.

For that matter, I can't get it to find anything on the local HDD either, even though I can browse the file system.
 
Is this a IDE drive in an USB enclosure? If so, I might be able to get up and running with no grub hacking. First, since installing to USB is a pain in my experience, remove the HD from the enclosure. Remove the other harddisks and set it up as primary master. Delete all partitions using DOS, create a 1 gig FAT16 partition and install DOS to it (format /s at the very least and copy over the important DOS files) and install the DOS utilities you need to it. Next, grab a copy of Simply MEPIS burn to CD and install. Put the HD back in the enclosure.

Just doing that will get you: DOS, MEPIS Linux, and Memtest x86(installed with MEPIS) selectable in Grub with no file changes. You may have to play with MEPIS a bit, as I'm not sure how well it deals with having the hardware changed on it. Make sure all the USB legacy support is turned on in your BIOS.

If it's a thumbdrive... Well, doing the above will get you a reference point to look at the menu.lst created.
 
upriverpaddler said:
http://syslinux.zytor.com/

Maybe, I don't know.
Click to expand...

I was planning on using grub to launch syslinux for my disk images...I'm not sure syslinux will do everything I'm trying to do on its own.

I've now got Fedora 7 on one system and am installing Ubuntu on another (the livecd locked up installing, trying the alternate now). I'm still having trouble with the first site linked...fedora won't launch grub on the terminal and when I get into grub's command line on boot, it won't "find" anything. Maybe I'm using the command wrong, I don't know.
 
tom61 said:
Is this a IDE drive in an USB enclosure? If so, I might be able to get up and running with no grub hacking. First, since installing to USB is a pain in my experience, remove the HD from the enclosure. Remove the other harddisks and set it up as primary master. Delete all partitions using DOS, create a 1 gig FAT16 partition and install DOS to it (format /s at the very least and copy over the important DOS files) and install the DOS utilities you need to it. Next, grab a copy of Simply MEPIS burn to CD and install. Put the HD back in the enclosure.

Just doing that will get you: DOS, MEPIS Linux, and Memtest x86(installed with MEPIS) selectable in Grub with no file changes. You may have to play with MEPIS a bit, as I'm not sure how well it deals with having the hardware changed on it. Make sure all the USB legacy support is turned on in your BIOS.

If it's a thumbdrive... Well, doing the above will get you a reference point to look at the menu.lst created.
Click to expand...

It is a thumbdrive. We're getting 8 GB drives as part of our new toolkits. I'd like to make the most of them and get everything imaginable on them, which is why I'm thinking grub might be our best option. It's just that I can't find a clear, informative article that tells me how to get started.
 
i use extlinux on a usb thumb drive that's about 32mb in size which can boot both linux,bsd, & windows. check it out, it's from the syslinux package. just make sure your motherboard supports booting of usb devices.
 
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