This project is archived and unmaintained. Please consider using Ventoy instead.
This project provides a template for bootable USB pen drive. You should be able to boot most ISO images of Linux distributations as well as Windows installation disks.
- You need a USB pen drive large enough to store the usb-multiboot data (~10MB) as well as the ISO image you want to boot
- Format the USB pen drive:
- use a Master Boot Record partition table (MBR)
- use a File Allocation Table file system (FAT32)
- Download usb-multiboot
and extract it. Move the contents of the folder
usb-multiboot-master
into the the top level directoy of the usb pen drive. Afterwards, this README file should be located in the top level directory of the drive. - Download or copy the ISO image you want to boot into the
images
folder. - If the ISO image is Ubuntu based, like IMAGINARY.OS, you can rename the ISO file to
IMAGINARYOS.iso
, otherwise proceed with the advanced configuration - Go to How to boot the USB pen drive
- Reboot your PC with the usb pen drive attached
- During early boot, hit the respective key to enter the menu for selecting the boot device
- This step highly depends on your specific system. It is usually one of function keys, ESC or ENTER
- Select your USB pen drive as the boot device
- Sometimes the two options UEFI and BIOS are offered. UEFI is recommended, but if this doesn't work, try the other options as well.
- TODO
- Adjust the loopback or chainloading configuration in
/boot/grub/grub.cfg
This requires a Linux system with syslinux
, dd
and parted
installed.
Run the following commands where:
/dev/sdX
has to be replaced with the device file for the USB drive./path/to/usb/boot
has to be replaced with the mount point of the FAT32 partition of the USB drive.
sudo syslinux -i -d /boot/syslinux /dev/sdbX1
sudo dd conv=notrunc bs=440 count=1 if=/path/to/usb/boot/syslinux/mbr/mbr.bin of=/dev/sdX
sudo parted /dev/sdX set 1 boot on
- OS specific guides
- short introduction/collection of resources around grub.cfg