Arch Linux

mvdan

Member

Registered: 2012-02-17

Posts: 11

USB device to chainload boot managers on any number of iso images

Hello everyone,

I believe this topic enters the Kernel & Hardware category. If that is not the case, please do fix it as needed.

Today I bought a brand new USB, and since it's quite large to fit just one bootable image on it, I thought I'd do a little research as to how to dinamically store many isos in the USB, being able to boot off any of them.

Ideally, upon booting off the USB it'd let you select which iso to boot, and then that iso would be booted with its own bootloader, à la GRUB2 chainloader. Why? Because these isos would each have their own boot options, interesting stuff like memtest, etcetera.

So I started researching. My first option was GRUB2 with its loopback devices, which can handle images in the filesystem but, unfortunately, need direct linux/initrd paths. Then I saw that GRUB2 can chainload into basically any bootloader, including syslinux. This looked like a great option, until I read some of gnu.org's documentation on it. It seems like chainload cannot use loopback devices:

Other loaders like appleloader, chainloader (BIOS, EFI, coreboot), freedos, ntldr and plan9 provide no possibility of loading initial ramdisk and as far as author is aware the payloads in question don't support either initial ramdisk or discovering loopback boot in other way and as such not bootable this way. Please consider alternative boot methods like copying all files from the image to actual partition. Consult your OS documentation for more details.

Rather than asking for a solution to this specific issue, I'd like to ask for your opinion. Surely I can't be the first one to have thought about this. Perhaps there's another point of view I'm missing?

Thank you for your time.

Lone_Wolf

Forum Moderator

From: Netherlands, Europe

Registered: 2005-10-04

Posts: 11,963

Re: USB device to chainload boot managers on any number of iso images

While it's  a windows program (they state it does run under wine though) , YUMI seems worth  a look :
http://www.pendrivelinux.com/yumi-multi … b-creator/

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Disliking systemd intensely, but not satisfied with alternatives so focusing on taming systemd.

(A works at time B)  && (time C > time B ) ≠  (A works at time C)