General :: Booting Multiple Images From A USB Stick?
Dec 27, 2010
I work with many different PCs with Windows XP and Windows 7 deployed, and I'm trying to consolidate my stacks of CDs into a single USB drive. I'd like to be able to boot off it and have a choice of a few options: A persistent Linux install for troubleshooting, the Win7 install CD, and the WinXP install CD.
I'm aware that most USB sticks can't be partitioned, but after much trial and error I've found one that can have its removable bit flipped, be treated as a USB hard drive and partitioned. I can set up 4 primary partitions and an initial test with a boot cd image on the first partition seems to work on 3 of my 4 home PCs... on (only) one of them though, Grub gives a 'Missing MBR-helper' error. All my systems, even the one not booting correctly, see the partitions as valid in both Linux and Windows, and I've successfully retrieved data from all of them. My guess is that it's a BIOS quirk on that particular machine, but it puts the whole idea in jeopardy... if it doesn't work on one of my own PCs, who's to say it will work on other PCs?
I'd like to salvage the partition idea if I can, maybe someone has run into this before... But if it's just not feasible, I read that Grub can boot image files under certain circumstances... I'm wondering if it's possible to have Grub (or any other bootloader) run the Win7 and WinXP CDs as image files? That way they could all sit on a single partition on the USB stick.
I haven't yet tried any other bootloaders, for all I know I could try something else and get things going.
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Apr 3, 2011
I am interested in making and burnung multiple isos in one cd.I ges first I have to extract them, then join them together by a menu and convert them again into a new iso, just I would need more detail in the mater.the reason of this operation is the following: imagine you have downloaded small distros like poppy linux and others, so one would not fill up your cd at all
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Jun 17, 2010
I just installed Linux Mint in my Netbook with help of USB stick. I don't have CD drive in my netbook.
Its working fine but without USB stick its not booting. If start with USB stick its booting fine.
The booting files are in USB, how do I change the booting option. so that I can boot without USB stick help.
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Mar 28, 2011
I am trying something: I would like to access to some data stored on a usb stick while I am booting to the kernel using the "init=/bin/sh" parameters.Is that possible ?My USB stick is detected when I do 'cat /var/log/messages.log | grep sdb". I had to "modprobe usb-storage".Quote:localhot kernel : sdb: sdb1localhost kernel: sd 3:0:0:0: [sdb] Attached SCSI removable diskBut I still can't get it mounted.Quote:mount: special device /dev/sdb1 does not exist"
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Mar 25, 2011
I'm trying to set up a netbook with Ubuntu for my computer-challenged Mother. I downloaded the image file to the download section of the new netbook, created a USB stick to boot from and then restarted the computer, pressing F2 in order to change the boot order. Using the "+" key I was able to put [Removable Dev.] on top: "1st Boot Device", but, and here's the thing, it is disabled: "A devince enclosed in the parenthesis has been disab led in the corresponding type menu." I do not understand this, nor do I know what to do
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Feb 18, 2011
I probably have not done any serious programming for 20 years, not counting a little HTML.
I stumbled onto an old FREESPIRE disk my bro sent me several years back -- and tried installing it on a Sony Vaio PCG FRV 28 I had crashed a few years back. The Sony bios is still aboard, but old enough to not have USB "booting" as part of the boot menu. I don't even know if one can easily hack into the BIOS on an old sony Vaio but changing the BIOS would solve lot of problems.
Does anyone have any ideas or certain knowledge on rewriting or modifying the Master Boot Code or an idea on making my USB [with Ubuntu or any other Linux implementation visible] and bootable to the bios on powerup?
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Oct 21, 2010
I installed three O.S on one drive. I disconnected this drive and installed two more OS's on the the next drive. On the first drive all three were bootable and on the second only the first O.S. would boot. The second drive booted both O.S at first and then stopped. I used a rescue disk on the second drive with two on it and it made no difference. I did the same to the first drive and I sort of joined the to boot loaders together in a non appreciative way.
Is is practical to do what I tried doing and should I just multiboot off one drive? I would like about eight O.S's on the same computer.
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Mar 24, 2010
I've searched for answers in google, but get not i wanted. I wanted to prepare bootable iso from usb under Ubuntu. Fine, there's UNetBootin, dd if= of= command etc. But I am concerned and the specific type of iso images booting - AntiVirus rescue cd's.
Using UNetBootin i could only prepare thumb drive to boot Dr. Web Rescue CD, but neither Kaspersky Rescue Disk nor F-Secure Rescue CD couldn't be preapred well (NOTE that my BIOS can boot livecd from usb drive!). Using dd if= of= command also didn't worked, cause prepared thumb couldn't boot - get errors: "Missing operating system" or "Could not find kernel image: linux". Is it that i must install grub/lilo or syslinux on thumb, then edit .cfg file and then copy image, or what? I'm concerned only on AV Rescue Disk's, like: Kaspersky, F-Secure, GData Boot CD, BitDefender Rescue Disk etc. I've booted (and it worked) Symantec boot cd but it's based on WinPE and i had prepared thumb under Windows 7, so it's a completely different story.
I have Bootable USB Drive Assistant in my Ubuntu 9.04 but when i try to choose some of those cd's, i get error that "It isn't installable CD image, so application can't use it" or something like that. What application do i have to use then?
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Jul 8, 2010
I've been searching for a program or a way to have multiple backroung images that automaticly change,like Windows 7,but unfortunately with no luck...
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Dec 22, 2009
How would I go installing Fedora to a USB stick and then booting from it?Does my BIOS have to support booting from a USB stick? because I don't think I have an option for that.So can someone explain to me how installing to and booting from a USB stick works?
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Mar 14, 2010
I have a couple of gigs of png files, each with 5-7 photos on each file. Currently I am making 5-7 duplicates of the file, then opening each one in gimp, and cropping and saving each one. kind of time consuming. Does anyone know of a program that will let me split an image into multiple slices?
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Nov 12, 2010
I have a folder full of image files. They are large files and they only need to be large icon size...manybe 2 inches wide. Is there a way to convert them without editing each file individually?
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Aug 3, 2010
I am running centOS specifically to run mrepo to create patches/updates for systems that are not permitted access to any public network. I understand how to get repositories for both -i386 and x86_64 versions.
My questionis that I have systems running RHEL Versions from 5.1 to 5.4 in the -i386 section. Do I create two -i386 directories and try to build separate repositories for each or just make one -386 directory using the 5.1 iso. Then use the same repository for both?
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Jul 12, 2010
Say I have an image of a file system. I made it with dd by copying it off my USB stick. e.g. "sudo dd if=/dev/sdb1 of=./image.ext2" I can mount said image with the command: "sudo mount -t ext2 -o loop ./image.ext2 /mnt/" Now, say instead of copying a partition with dd, I copy a whole drive. e.g. "sudo dd if=/dev/sdb of=./image.img". sdb had 2 partitions on it. How can I mount those separate partitions without copying that image back onto the USB drive?
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Jan 3, 2010
I have a very nice digital photo camera and I love to take my pictures at the highest quality setting available. My Canon is a 12 mega pixel camera so the photos get very large. After I shoot a weekend of 200+ pictures, the last thing I want to do is resize them so I can share them on Facebook. Does anyone know of a Linux program that will allow me to re-size multiple images rather than using Gimp to do each individual photo?
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May 2, 2011
I know that ImageMagick's convert program can be used as follows to convert a collection of images -- say, in PNG format -- to a PDF file:
convert *png output.pdf
The problem with this is that each image is then stretched to fit on one page, whereas I would like to keep the original dimensions of the images and put as many as possible on one page in the PDF file before moving on to another page.
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Jan 26, 2011
-I could use a hand in installing opensuse on my 2009 Intel Macbook
-I need to use a USB stick for the install, my optical drive doesn't work.
-I am trying to reformat my macbook to run 64-bit opensuse 11.3 instead of Apple's proprietary operating system, OS X
-So I started here: Chapter1.Installation with YaST
-And in this article, under section 1.1. Choosing the Installation Media, i found this sub-section: Booting the LiveCD from an USB Stick.
-So i followed those steps to create a bootable USB stick in Terminal, and i got an error in Terminal and was unable to go any further;
-this was the error in Terminal: dd: bs: illegal numeric value
Would anyone know what the error means, and what i should have typed instead? Is it because my USB stick is generic instead of being a specific type like a U3 stick?
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Jul 30, 2010
I have a bootable usb stick with a Linux utility on it. After poking around for a bit I figured out the boot order:
isolinux.bin <--reads isolinux.cfg
loads the kernel: SA.1
loads initrd: SA.2
then depending on the options you select it boots one of two .iso files I want this utility to netboot instead of booting with a usb stick; is there a way I can package isolinux.bin, isolinux.cfg, the kernel and initramfs, iso's and all the other files on the root of the usb stick into one iso that can be tftp'd to the host which would then boot something that would extract the iso to ramdisk and start booting so that isolinux would run as if all the files were locally stored on CD/usb stick?
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Feb 14, 2011
Here's the idea -- be able to boot slackware 13.1 DVD from a USB stick, but without using anything like an initrd or loading the contents of the slackware install all into memory first. So the USB stick is behaving like a hard drive (but with one disadvantage, just don't take the usb stick out while you're using it!). It has the advantage of saving on memory though .
In the above thread I had this idea working ok but only with slackware 13 and earlier. In fact I still have the CF card with it on, and it works fine. Only snag is it won't work with the newer 13.1.
Right now, I'm trying to use qemu for the following (not what I wrote above!). The idea is to use qemu to install a minimum slackware 13.1 to the USB stick, set it up and then boot from the USB stick itself (so I'm using the USB stick as the storage medium as opposed to say a hard drive image file).
So let's say (this is what I'm doing) I boot slackware 13.1 (32 bit) and make two partitions;
Code:
I then do a minimal installation of slackware (just "A" and jed from "AP"). Lilo is not installed as later I'll be using GRUB2 to try to boot.
I'm using a slackware package, grub-1.97-beta4-i486-1.tgz for slackware 13.1/GRUB2.
I then boot off the slackware 13.1 DVD but at the boot screen I choose to boot from /dev/sda2 which is the linux install I created earlier. Success, it boots ok and I can get into the slackware 13.1 install on the USB disk (which is /dev/sda2).
I then label the ext3 partition by using e2label;
Code:
And also change /etc/fstab;
Code:
Now I need some sort of bootloader to put onto the USB stick so I don't need the DVD any more. To do this, I'm trying to use GRUB2.
But here's the problem!
When I install slackware onto the USB stick using qemu, that partition is /dev/sda2. It's the first usb/storage medium that slackware detects so it gets the name sdaX. (X=1, fat partition, X=2 EXT3 linux).
But here's the problem. Suppose I take the USB stick over to another PC with a hard drive already inside it. Slackware would see the hard drive installed in that PC as (say) /dev/sda1 and the USB stick would then become the second drive, so /dev/sdbX (X=1, fat partition, X=2 EXT3 linux).
If I specify a specific device (lets say /dev/sda2) then it won't work in another system because if I take the example above, another PC with a hard drive installed in it the USB stick becomes /dev/sdb2 and the GRUB2 boot program would be expecting /dev/sda2 which won't work. What I need to do is to somehow find the install, the root on the USB stick automatically without having to specify it manually.
So here's what I've tried with grub (First thing I did was to install grub with grub-install /dev/sda).
Code:
Snag is it dosen't work :-( I get this booting from the USB stick:
Code:
If I try this:
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I get a very similar result ....
Code:
So what I'm wondering is .... if the "search" line in grub is doing the searching for the root GRUB2 needs to use to boot from - how can I tell the next line, "linux /boot/vmlinuz-huge-smp-2.6.33.4-smp root=...." where to boot from? I can't use /dev/sda2 or /dev/sdb2 because if I try the usb stick in a different PC the stick will be a different device name. Trying to use LABEL= or /dev/disk/by-label/USB/ also dosen't work .
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Jun 16, 2011
Oooookay, so basically the idea I have is that I would like to boot Windows XP over an AoE connection. This is no issue, however the problem comes when I want to have a single, read-only image as the base image and want to be able to boot multiple computers off this image.Licensing issues aside (let's assume that this complies with all licensing issues, or we can think of it as just a conceptual "how could we do this"), the basic issues are thus:Each boot of Windows will require a writable AoE device...The original disk image must be read-only to avoid changes in 1 boot affecting all boots(As far as I know) The AoE device must be a disk image, or some block device rather than a mounted file system (if this is not so, aufs could be used)So the long and the short of this, from what I can tell is that we need a read only device that we can write to.
At the end of a session, the changes to the device will be discarded, so these can be thought of as simple temporary sessions. This means that there is little concern with having changes to the original read-only image effecting the modifications to the "duplicate" images.
I would like to avoid duplicating the image for each instance, however if no solution can be reached then this could be a possibility (every boot, we can copy the image, give the fresh image to the new boot and remove when done)Optimally, changes to the filesystem will be written to a different filesystem (much like what aufs does, however as stated earlier, afaik aufs only deals with 2 mounted file systems, whereas we need the end result to be an image or block device)Sorry if I havn't explained this particularly well, however I've been trying to think of solutions, caveats and generally how to define the problem as I was writing. If you think that this idea is ridiculous because software x handles the problem better, I'd be very pleased to hear about it, but the basic requirement of temporary, network bootable windows xp sessions still applies.
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Feb 7, 2010
I am getting a "No devices matches MBR identifier 0x8c71ad6e!" message along with a reboot in 120 seconds message. This occurs after kernel load and at the start of openSUSE boot.
I have tried both the 64bit and 32bit downloads
openSUSE-11.2-KDE4-LiveCD-i686.iso
openSUSE-11.2-KDE4-LiveCD-x86_64.iso
I have checksum checked both images after download. I have attempted the install on CD and USB stick with both images and the result is always the same.
I've included a screen image on my site: No Devices Matches MBR Identifier | Badzilla
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Feb 28, 2010
I have a problem booting anything from USB stick on my IBM Thinkpad T42. It used to run normally, I could even install Windows or Linux from it, but now it stopped working. This particular concern is about booting freshly installed Xubuntu version 9.04 off a Kingston 4GB flash stick. I've installed Xubuntu using usb-create program directly from a booted live cd. Installation went fine and all the options in BIOS are setup correctly (I think). In boot menu in BIOS the stick is recognized correctly and + appears in front of it. Stick is selected as primary boot device. BIOS usb support is also enabled.
Now when I power on the computer, it reads something from the stick and stops right after displaying:
SYSLINUX 3.63 Debian-2008=07=15 EBIOS ... etc...
Then nothing happens and the text stays on like this.
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Sep 21, 2009
I am just spent half an hour hunting for a thing that should be totally available already:USB install images of Ubuntu, knoppix and all the others.And, the only good way are so far complicated tutorials where you extract the stuff from an CD image. Why??Hasn't everybody notices that CDs/DVDs are vanishing big time? That more and more systems don't have the readers anymore? Instead of following a 10 point instruction list, it would be nice to just be able to download a Ubuntu 8.10 or whatever USB image and be able to beam that DIRECTLY to a USB stick with a dd command.
Or am a missing something here? Does this exist?It should by no means be mariginal, considering how important USB stick in specific and flash memory in general have become.
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Nov 23, 2010
Before migrating to Fedora/linux, during my window days, one of my programme of choice was MS word. regardless of all it's bugs, it did all i needed it to do (eventually). Now in Fedora I have Open Office. As far as word processing it's fine. But when it comes to inserting Images I hit a brick wall.
when it cam to making bingo cards, I could choose multiple images and resize them with one click, move them all together and crop them on the fly. Open Office doesn't do that. My question is: What other option are there in the fedora world that could help me.
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Jan 11, 2010
I have a Compaq Presario CQ60 laptop with an Nvidia 8200M graphics card. When I try to enable visual effects I am asked to install the Nvidia restricted driver. When I do this and reboot, I get 6 copies of the Ubuntu screen on my display. Does anyone know what is causing this? I'm not sure which version it installed, I assume either 173 or 185. I have downloaded version 190 from the Nvidia web site. Should I install that version? If so, it is a .run file, how do I install it?Also, how do I reinstall the old driver. I fixed the problem this time by reinstalling Ubuntu, but that will get old if I have to do it too often.
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Jan 13, 2010
I have both windows XP home and Ubuntu 9.10 installed on my computer. I started with Ubuntu 8.04 (i think that was the number) and it has updated a few times since then. You see the thing is that when I choose an operating system at the boot up, it lists all of the updates to ubuntu. so there are like 12 options to choose from besides windows XP and Ubuntu 9.10.
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Jun 26, 2011
I have Ubuntu 11.04 on a disk, and installed it on an empty hard drive. When I start my desktop my screen is black with a flashing "_" in the top left corner... Nothing happens. I usually have to restart the computer multiple times before it will actually work. I tried running Ubuntu in recovery mode and fixing any broken packages, but no luck.
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Mar 22, 2011
I am trying to boot up Vista Home Premium from USB since my internal (bootable) CD-RW drive has failed and I cannot boot up Vista from CD.
I have Ubuntu running in the Windows partition and all my windows files are in there so I don't want to do a full installation of Ubuntu (yet).
I formatted an 8GB USB stick into two partitions
I then copied over to /dev/sdb1 all files from a Vista CD using an external CD-RW drive (which is not recognised as bootable on USB port).
In my Dell BIOS settings I changed the boot sequence to be bootable from USB disk first.
then I tried to reboot Vista installation in the USB stick.
But I get this message ..."this is not a bootable disk .. insert a bootable floppy"
So I could not boot up the Vista installation files.
When the boot flag is "on" in a GParted created partition does this make the partition DOS bootable for Vista installation?
My question is - What utility in Ubuntu 10.10 can create a DOS bootable partition on a USB stick? It seems that the MBR might have been overwritten when I installed Grub 2.0.
I can Grub dual boot between Windows and Ubuntu but I can't get very far with Windows .. stalls in safe mode.
So a Vista repair is called for. I would prefer not to reinstall Vista afresh at this stage.
There is a thread here explaining how to repair Vista bootloader
[url]
But it assumes that I am able to boot from CD-RW drive.
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Oct 31, 2010
With the startup disk creator on Ubuntu (Currently running Ubuntu 10.04 LTS) I realised you could boot Ubuntu from a USB and then install it onto the HDD if you wish to. *Side note* Still amazes me you can run a whole operating system from a USB memory stick drive *End Side note* Now My question is: 'Is it possible to have multiple distros of Linux on a USB memory stick and choose which one you wish to boot from when you boot up the computer?'I was hoping to get a seagate portable HDD ((here) and load quite a few different Linux distros on it to get a broader view of Linux than just Ubuntu (Although Ubuntu does rock ).
Is there simple ways of doing this? I have read around this forum and Google and a suggestion was given to install all of the distros onto the portable HDD/ USB memory stick and then install Ubuntu onto it last as its good for picking up other OSes in its GRUB. (Again if my idea on GRUB and its workings are wrong please point it out - got to keep learning)
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Jan 23, 2011
I have 3 hard drives installed to my system, 1TB, 2TB and 500GB drives with the following configuration:
ledi@ledi-ubuntu:~$ sudo parted /dev/sda print
Model: ATA SAMSUNG HD103UJ (scsi)
Disk /dev/sda: 1000GB
Sector size (logical/physical): 512B/512B
Partition Table: msdos
[Code]...
I can boot to the Ubuntu installation in the 2TB drive. My problem reversed when I reinstalled grub to one of the Ubuntu installations in the 1TB drive. I can boot to any of the OS's in the 1TB drive, but not to the Ubuntu in the 2TB drive. The error message is the same as above. I have no idea what am I doing wrong and I would be really grateful for any assistance.
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