USB Key Multitool? 34
srhuston asks: "I've got a USB key that I use for booting and installing machines (GRUB boots and pulls the rest from the network). This got me thinking, all the floppy disks and CDs that I use for various tasks, such as memtest86, SuperRescue, Plan-B, tomsrtbt and others with which I'd like to experiment, I could probably get a larger key and put a few of them on there. The problem is booting them all - it seems that unless I copy the contents of the CD to the key, I wouldn't be able to boot it properly, and doing that means I can only use one of them at a time and have to copy another to the key when I want to use it. Ideally I'd love to be able to have my GRUB menu (or something similar) pop up, and select which of the items I want to boot. Any ideas how I might accomplish this? GRUB doesn't seem to support booting an image (floppy or ISO), and ISOLINUX seems to want to boot just one image and not give options for multiple ones. Oh, and yes, I did look first and found more questions than answers."
Re:partitions? (Score:4, Insightful)
Is it possible to use fdisk to "partition" a CD or a floppy - has anyone tried this? If it is, then what you suggest should be workable.
As far as my suggestion, I would suggest letting ISOLINUX switch between multiple kernels. If you need an MS partition, I think I remember a FreeDos kernel that can be loaded into ISOLINUX, and then the MS software can be bootstrapped thence. Within the drive, you can definitely store disk image files as opposed to multiple partitions, and let the kernel you boot mount the image as root instead of
Re:partitions? (Score:3, Insightful)
Boot DOS, then linux with loadlin (Score:3, Insightful)
Anyone know of a way to format/SYS a USB key with FreeDOS? Please share.