Saturday 16 January 2010

Booting multiple live CD's from a single USB

Recently, I got a 1TB USB drive. I was planning on using this just for backups, but quite frankly, it's so big there's no need to limit it to just that. So I decided I'd put a few live CD images on it somehow to get a sort of universal test drive. I set aside about 30G which is way overkill, but in GiB, it meant the remaining was a round 900 (darn GB vs GiB thing).

First thing's first, what to put on it? I figure Ubuntu's a good choice for a beginner Linux that would probably boot anywhere (or try to). Along with that, Linux Mint seems to be a great looking option, too. Plus it's green! Also, Fedora since I'm using that on the laptop. Maybe Ubuntu Netbook Remix and something similar like Moblin. And since I'm a bit crazy, there'd have to be the 64-bit versions too. Finally, a few recovery things like GParted or similar.

Now that I have some idea what to get, I have to figure out how to get it to boot. Since I need to get a few live CD's working at the same time, I figure I can't just extract them at the root of the drive (like you would if you wanted a regular LiveUSB). So the question is how I can get them to boot straight from the ISO. First, I need a bootloader that will understand ISO files for me. I saw a few patches to GRUB to do this, but it looks like GRUB 2 proper also supports loading from an ISO, though it's still experimental. Since it's unstable in Gentoo, I had to unmask it first. I also set the multislot USE flag on GRUB so I wouldn't lose the stable version.

# Unmask GRUB 2
echo "=sys-boot/grub-1.97.1 **" >> /etc/portage/package.keywords
echo "sys-boot/grub multislot" >> /etc/portage/package.use
emerge -va =sys-boot/grub-1.97.1
# My USB drive is on /dev/sdf
# and the partition is labelled "LiveLinux"
grub2-install --no-floppy --root-directory=/media/LiveLinux /dev/sdf

Next I'll go over the results of trying to get each LiveCD to boot from ISO.

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