Comments on: Making a Multi Booting CD DVD USB

By: Booting GNU/Linux from USB - Page 2

Booting GNU/Linux from USB - Page 2 — Thu, 15 Apr 2010 09:26:35 +0000

[...] I have finished the writeup i was working on and the process (finished long ago) works very well and i can boot all the os from a Live cd and USB. Although there are some troubles in some systems with booting DSL from USB, in my system and the other test systems i have used works fine. Here is the link of my personal edition of the writeup in my blog: http://phoxis.org/2009/09/01/multi_boot_cddvdusb/ [...]

By: phoxis

phoxis — Sun, 31 Jan 2010 07:02:06 +0000

Are you trying to boot the LiveCD ISO images itself ? Then they will not work like this. Or else if you have extracted the kernels and the initrds in the proper location, then are the other files in the correct position so that the LiveCD’s scripts could find then in place. Chek Phase – II . When creating syslinux.cfg you entered correct paths, but did you include proper kernel parameters which they need? They could be found in the configuration files of the LiveCDs, check them for which image’s kernel need which parameter. If you change the location of the other files of a certain LiveCD relative to the root of the USB, then you might need to pass the new changed location as a kernel parameter in order to make the scripts find them.
I would suggest you to first download some mini distro ISOs, and try putting them in your USB drive on by one. Extract one mini disttro put it in the proper places as the guide describes, and check if it works. Then try another. This will make sure things are going fine at your end.
For the grub matter, it does not have the bios drive mapped to your usb device. You can do it manually.
First make a file “myusb” (without quotes) inside the root of your USB drive. I assume the path of this file is /mnt/disk/myusb , change as needed.
Copy GRUB files in your usb

cp /boot/grub/*stage* /media/disk/boot/grub

Go into superuser, and then execute:

grub

now find this file and locate the bios drive

find /myusb

you will get an output in the format (hd?,?) where the ‘?’ s are numbers, replace then as per your output. Now set this as root and setup GRUB in MBR

root (hd?, ?)
setup (hd?)

this should install GRUB.
I have updated the post with these information.

Please let me know if this helps, and what exactly the problem you are facing. Thanks for the great feedback.

By: Nix

Nix — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 21:51:47 +0000

Hi,

thank you for this nice How-to.
I thought about combining multiple small live cds in one usb live system with a nice menu etc for quite some now, especially since i have a new Subnetbook with no optical drive. Because i use tools like gparted, clonezilla, Super Grub disc etc. quite frequently, all of them around 100-150Mb and even less, i hoped to achieve this following your nice guide.
Unfortunately i had no luck, neither the grub nor the syslinux way.
Grub simply refuses to install to the mbr “/dev/sdb does not have any corresponding BIOS drive.”
And although i created a decent syslinux.cfg with the correct path information and used the adviced steps in Phase VI i can’t make it work. I can see and use my created menu, but all boot attempts get stuck when it comes to probing for the hdd’s long after the kernel images have been loaded. All individual live usb images are working.
I am also kinda stuck now…
Do you have an idea what might be causing this?

Thank you and good bye

By: Nulled Scripts

Nulled Scripts — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 22:47:14 +0000

Nice post..Keep them coming :) Thanks for sharing.

By: phoxis

phoxis — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 15:38:59 +0000

This guide was made to compile all the mini distros. I cannot tell anything about XP or any windows stuff, but the slax, mint or others can be done easily, what you have to do is just see how the files are located in the original LiveCD , or else as i have told in the article, check the docs, kernel parameters, forums, and if possible see the loading script, and you will come to know what are the exact needs of that distro and what you have to do is to configure your multiboot media in that format. Once you understand one format it is almost the same for others. And for the password crackers, CDlinux has got the Offline NT Password and Registry editor, the chntpw program, you can reset passwords with that too. Let me know if you are able to compile the above stuffs.

By: hrishi

hrishi — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 12:02:01 +0000

good work pal

can do it with
linux mint 8
ophcrack-vista-livecd-2.1
ophcrack-xp-livecd-2.1
slax-6.1.0
ubuntustudio-9.04
pclinuxos-minime-kde3-2009.1.iso

must have answer for another kolkatian

By: phoxis

phoxis — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 04:06:34 +0000

@zack Have a look at the below links and see if the direct mapping helps. Although this is not guaranteed to work in all the BIOSes

http://diddy.boot-land.net/grub4dos/files/map.htm
http://grub4dos.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Grub4dos_tutorial#Direct_mapping

I have never tried booting from an ISO image with GRUB4DOS , i think you should have a try.

By: zack

zack — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 17:34:07 +0000

Is there a way to add bootable cds that don’t use isolinux or grub? (bartpe, dban, windows install disc, etc.)

By: Adam

Adam — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 08:37:09 +0000

Amazing article! good work!