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Is there a way to burn several ISOs to a USB external drive and be able to plug it in and boot to one of them?

Would creating several partitions and burning to each one work or something like that.

Willis James
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3 Answers3

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You can try unetbootin (http://unetbootin.sourceforge.net) or yumi(http://www.pendrivelinux.com/yumi-multiboot-usb-creator). I've used both with good success for what you're trying to do.

Bradley Forney
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While what you want to do is doable, not all images will boot properly from an ISO.

But all is not lost. There are hardware based devices which do this. Notably, the Zalman VE-x00 family, as well as the isostick.

The Zalman has gotten some bad reviews on some sites due to the poorly made micro-USB connector on it, so caveat emptor. I have no personal experience with either of the devices, and although the isostick is more expensive, I've considered acquiring the latter in the near future.

Hope this helps somewhat.

JSanchez
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Yes, this is possible, and you don't (necessarily) need to create mulitple partitions. You will need to install GRUB 2 to your USB drive, though (and your computer/BIOS needs to support booting from USB).

Examples for some Linux systems.

You can't do this directly with Windows ISOs, but if you create a second partition and copy the files from the ISO, you can use GRUB 2 to chainload NTLDR.

You can also use MEMDISK, especially if you want to boot older OSes or floppy images. It supports some modern OSes as well (although not Ubuntu or Windows without modification).

user55325
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