USB Key Multitool?

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."

how do you boot from USB?

[Leonig Mig]

is it just more modern machines that do this - does the BIOS need to support it - or can you do it with any USB machine.

get a key for each

[chocolatetrumpet]

Just get a usb keychain for each one.. they're cheap these days.

Simple isn't always bad :-)

Re:partitions?

[Malor]

I forget where it is, but there's a setting you have to change under XP to be able to use NTFS on a potentially removable device. I think it might be properties on the disk itself... there's some kind of checkbox that's related somehow to 'optimize for removable'.

From what I gathered at the time (and I'm sorry I'm not clearer about remembering where it is), NTFS requires a lot of write caching to work properly, and thus Windows by default refuses to format removable drives NTFS. But keep in mind that if you do this, you MUST stop the drive with the Safely Remove Hardware applet. You CANNOT just pull it, or you'll probably corrupt it.

I don't know if this will also let you partition it, but it's worth a try...?