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.

Re:partitions?

[Geoffreyerffoeg]

I have not been able to repartition my disk. I haven't tried manually fdisking it, but I doubt it can be done. It seems that some flash drives emulate a fixed disk with a partition table, e.g., my dad's flash drive, which comes with multiple partitions to manage its security software. Others, e.g., mine, seem to only emulate a removable disk and a single partition.

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 /dev/whatever.

Re:partitions?

[Nasarius]

I've had no problems repartitioning my Lexar JumpDrive. It acts just like a SCSI hard drive under Linux. I use cfdisk.

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...?

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.

Re:UBCD.

[Anonymous Coward]

Got something against Clickable links?

<a href="http://ubcd.sourceforge.net/">Ultimate Boot CD</a>

Its not hard.

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

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

[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.

Boot DOS, then linux with loadlin

[donutz]

I've got RUNT booting from my USB key. Actually, I formatted the USB key under Windows 98, SYS'ed it to make it boot to DOS, and then I set up a menu in config.sys/autoexec.bat to give me the choice of booting RUNT via loadlin or a DOS prompt. You could load pretty much any kernel you need via loadlin from DOS.

Anyone know of a way to format/SYS a USB key with FreeDOS? Please share.