This project is archived and unmaintained. Please consider using Ventoy instead.

usb-multiboot

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.

How to create the bootable USB pen drive

1. 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
2. Format the USB pen drive:

• use a Master Boot Record partition table (MBR)
• use a File Allocation Table file system (FAT32)

1. 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.
2. Download or copy the ISO image you want to boot into the images folder.
3. 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
4. Go to How to boot the USB pen drive

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.

Troubleshooting

• TODO

Advanced configuration

Grub configuration

• Adjust the loopback or chainloading configuration in /boot/grub/grub.cfg

Booting in legacy BIOS mode

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

TODO

• OS specific guides
• short introduction/collection of resources around grub.cfg