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."

partitions?

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

Re:partitions?

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?

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

Re:partitions?

Ok, I'm trying right now. I went to Mac OS X's terminal, sudo unmount'ed the disks (and confused the GUI in the process), and then used fdisk on the partition manually. I don't think there's an easy automatic way of turning a single partition (/dev/disk1)

Re:partitions?

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 r

A related question about RAID on external media

A while ago I found a site that had a USB 2.0 Thumb Drive set of benchmarks (Here, if interested) [arstechnica.com] and on page 8 [arstechnica.com] he does something VERY interesting - creates a RAID 0 array out of two similar drives and shows us the benchmarks of that array.

Scaled in almos

Re:A related question about RAID on external media

You'd wear it out pretty fast. Flash drives only support a certain number of writes (100,000 per sector, IIRC), which sounds like a lot -- and it is for most uses of the devices. But when used as a hard drive, temp files can eat up those writes very quic

Re:partitions?

Correction. Yes, it is possible to repartition my USB disk. Windows won't let you do it. Mac OS X let me do it in the Terminal: umount /dev/disk1, fdisk a partition table onto it, and then mkfs or Disk Utility|Initialize /dev/disk1s*. It seems to work grea

UBCD.

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.

Got something against Clickable links [sourceforge.net]?

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

Its not hard.

Try cdshell

Try http://www.cdshell.org/ [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/ [sourceforge.net] and http://www.ubcd4win.com/ [ubcd4win.com] and a couple other tools I've found usefull

how do you boot from USB?

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.

Re:how do you boot from USB?

BIOS needs to support booting from USB.

Pretty rare in all but the most recent systems.

Re:how do you boot from USB?

yes, yes, and no
many older motherboards and laptops do not support booting from usb, and of those that do some only support booting from usb floppies.
most new motherboards support booting from usb drives (usb hd as well as most flash drives) and floppies.

get a key for each

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

Simple isn't always bad :-)

Re:get a key for each

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

Simple isn't always bad :-)"

It could kind of go either way, couldn't it? On the one hand, if he makes 1 and it dies or something, he's got some work ahead of him to make a second. Not as

Re:get a key for each

You might check into the system rescue CD [sysresccd.org]. It is more common for CD drives to be able to boot than USB devices, anyway, but if you want to use your USB key, you may be able to use the same booting method they use to load the images of the different utilit

What about older machines, is there a boot floppy

that will in turn boot your USB keychain? It would be nice to be able run one of these on USB 1.1 machines too. That'd cover a pretty wide spectrum of machines out there.

Combine grub and isolinux

I boot multiple disk images from my usb key using grub as the menu, and memdisk from the syslinux package.

In grub/menu.lst I have something like:

title Hitachi Drive test utility
root (hd0,0)
kernel /boot/memdisk
initrd=/boot/dft377_29.img

Some things bo

Re:Combine grub and isolinux

I suspect that the images that won't properly load are those that have their own self-contained loader and expect the image to be in a specific position on the medium (typically floppy).

Boot DOS, then linux with loadlin

I've got RUNT [ncsu.edu] 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 [ffm.fgan.de] 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.

Re:Partitions

usb keys do support multiple partitions just like any other block device

Depends on the key.

I know that mine can't be partitioned (at least, my efforts thus far have failed).

Is it possible to partition a floppy? If so, does it make sense? Then you might

Re:Partitions

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 par

Re:Partitions

For what it's worth, my lexar fob appears as "sda" and I had no trouble partitioning it exactly as if it were a "regular" floppy.

Re:You could....

Bad troll! :)

Next time use some inititiative and just Google it [google.com]

cLive ;-)