Creating multi-boot USB drives [SOLVED]

[tld]

I'm looking for any suggestions as to something for creating multi-boot USB drives. I tried to install MultiBootUSB from a repo here:

https://gpo.zugaina.org/sys-boot/multibootusb

That required udisks which I didn't have...nor dbus, polkit, etc. That sent me into the rabbit hole from hell which is that whole polkit thing with the spidermonkey dependency. No way will I accept that, so I hunted down one of the ebuilds for polkit with duktape instead of spidermonkey. After struggling through that mess and installing tons of stuff I really do NOT want, I was able to install MultiBootUSB 9.2.0, but ran into this unresolved bug:

https://github.com/mbusb/multibootusb/issues/468

Code: Select all

multibootusb -c
Using python version  3.7.9 (default, Oct  4 2020, 13:16:32) 
[GCC 9.3.0] on platform Linux-5.4.72-gentoo-i686-Intel-R-_Pentium-R-_4_CPU_2.53GHz-with-gentoo-2.7
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "/usr/lib/python-exec/python3.7/multibootusb", line 187, in <module>
    if config.debug is True:
NameError: name 'config' is not defined

That's starting to give me the impression that MultiBootUSB is hopeless...especially given how many others got that and the fact that it's not resolved.

NOT very promising. Any suggestions? Thanks!

Tom

[DawgG]

it's possible with grub2 alone; i did it a long time ago (with a grml-iso, i think). just install grub2 to the usb-drive and write a config that loopback-mounts the iso(s) (which must support this, but nowadays most isos do.)
a quick websearch turned up this short explanation: https://www.pendrivelinux.com/boot-mult ... ing-linux/
GOOD LUCK!

[tld]

Yea...thanks for the suggestion! That may be the way to go, though I'd probably do it with syslinux instead if possible (which is what I use on all my machines). Thanks for the link too.

Tom

EDIT: Interesting...this looks promising:

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Mu ... nd_memdisk

[tld]

Wow. All I've accomplished so far is proving to myself that there are about 1000 things here I don't understand...talk about a rabbit hole. Everything about this confuses me and I think I've managed to generate every possible error there is in syslinux.

Gave up for now.

Tom

[Irre]

Create an ext2 boot partition. Install LILO bootloader. Configure and run lilo. Done.

[tld]

I actually got this working with syslinux. It was pretty confusing but I'll try to lay out what I did (hopefully I'll get all this right). What I did was similar to what's described here:

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Mu ... nd_memdisk

A few things to note: As noted above the ISO used gets loaded into memory so this isn't suitable for very large images. In my case the USB device was /dev/sdc and I mounted it's one partition at the directory /mnt/sdc1. Adjust these for your specific case of course.

Since the USB drive had an existing image put on it with dd I used fdisk to remove the partitions. Then I creates 1 primary partition, and used the "a" option to enable the boot option on that partition. Then I did the following:

I created a fat file system with:

Code: Select all

mkfs.vfat /dev/sdc1

Then I added the syslinux MBR (be VERY careful):

Code: Select all

dd bs=440 conv=notrunc count=1 if=/usr/share/syslinux/mbr.bin of=/dev/sdc

Then I mounted it with:

Code: Select all

mount /dev/sdc1 /mnt/sdc1

...and did the following:

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mkdir -p /mnt/sdc1/boot/extlinux
extlinux --install /mnt/sdc1/boot/extlinux
cd /usr/share/syslinux
cp menu.c32 memdisk libcom32.c32 libutil.c32 /mnt/sdc1/boot/extlinux

Then I created the syslinux config file at /mnt/sdc1/boot/extlinux/syslinux.cfg with this:

Code: Select all

cat /mnt/sdc1/boot/extlinux/syslinux.cfg 
UI menu.c32

LABEL wdlifeguard.iso
	LINUX memdisk
	INITRD /wdlifeguard.img
	APPEND raw

LABEL clonezilla-live-2.7.0-10-amd64.iso
	LINUX memdisk
	INITRD /clonezilla-live-2.7.0-10-amd64.iso
	APPEND iso

LABEL memtest86+-5.01.iso
	LINUX memdisk
	INITRD /memtest86+-5.01.iso
	APPEND iso

Note that all the files in those INITRD lines were copied to the root of the file system...that is, to /mnt/sdc1 in my case. Also note that, as per the explanation here:

https://wiki.syslinux.org/wiki/index.ph ... DISK#Usage

...that wdlifeguard.img (Western Digital Lifeguard) uses "APPEND raw" as it's a DOS disk (that boots to an A:> prompt) while the other two are bootable ISO images and use "APPEND iso".

Note that I tested this on a Windows laptop and that required going into the setup a) disabling secure boot, and b) allowing both UEFI or legacy BIOS booting. In any case, sure enough I got a menu with those three options and they all worked.

Tom

[tld]

An update to this: The multi-boot USB created with syslinux and memdisk was so unreliable on my system I had to abandon it. Looking further into this, I just don't see any good options for doing this. The problem with using grub2 and loopback mounts is that a) You loose any boot menu that the existing image may have had, and b) The grub.cfg file on your USB drive needs to have entries for each boot option, which means you need to know the exact boot options you want for each. Really ugly.

I also looked into using refind, where you can apparently do this by having separate file systems for each system you want to boot, and writing the raw images to those partitions. The problem I see with that is that....unless I'm missing something...it only appears to find bootable Linux system and not systems from other iso images...at least it seems that way.

On my new AMD based system I was trying booting to actual CDs using a USB burner I have. For whatever reason, I'm having issues even with that, specifically for booting Linux systems. For example, I can write a clonzilla ISO image to a USB drive with dd and it works perfectly. However if I burn the exact same ISO to a CD (for example using cdrdao) which I've been doing forever, it start to boot from the CD but then does really screwy crap like complaining about unknopwn file systems, and won't boot. Totally sucks.

Tom