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."

Comments

partitions?

[ksheff]

Can you create multiple partitions on a key and then use grub to boot from the different partitions? The HOWTO implies that it can be done, but I don't have any of these devices to verify it.

UBCD.

[kyhwana]

http://ubcd.sourceforge.net/ (ultimate boot cd, which includes linux and various diagnostic/recovery tools) does this.
It gives you a menu when you boot with all the stuff it has. See the screenshots on the site.

Try cdshell

[Yogger]

Try http://www.cdshell.org/. It's a scriptable menu that you can use to boot multiple floppy images off of cds, not sure if it works for usb keys but it's worth a try. With some tinkering you can boot linux or windows live cds but if it's too big to fit in a floppy image, you can only do one of each per disk (or usb key in your case). I have a cd built with it combining http://ubcd.sourceforge.net/ and http://www.ubcd4win.com/ and a couple other tools I've found usefull

Re:Partitions

[polymath69]

Is it possible to partition a floppy?

Not really and kinda/sorta.

The "not really" is that modern OSs treat floppies as once big expanse of sectors, upon which a filesystem of some sort is put (FAT/EXT2/whatever) or not (cpio/tar/etc). There's no partition table as such; the dimensions are just taken as given for the drive and media.

For the kinda/sorta, I recall a utility for the Apple ][ that placed both DOS and ProDOS filesystems on the same side of a 120KB floppy. This was possible, not because of partition tables, but because DOS stored its filesystem markers on tracks 0-2 and ProDOS around track 13. So it was possible to make a disk that looked half-size to either OS. This was seldom useful, but still kind of cool.

Venturing back towards the topic, ZIP floppies do have partition tables, probably because they act like SCSI disks. Memory fobs probably have their choice to allow partitioning (emulating, say, /dev/sda) or to have it fixed (emulating only /dev/sda1 or the like.) Looks like some do it each way.