USB Multipassing

Now that computers allow users to boot up operating systems off of their flash drive instead of using a hard drive it is not uncommon to see a programmer carry a handful of USB drives. If you stop to ask them why they carry so many they'll show you how one can boot a distribution of Linux and how another can run a windows recovery program and on and on. Shouldn't there be an easier way to put all of your favorite operating systems and software onto a single flash drive? In this tutorial I will outline how to install and personalize grub4dos in order to 'multipass' your USB drive.

Installation

So first off, what is grub4dos? Grub4dos is a boot manager that can fit on a flash drive so that every time you boot off of that drive a window will popup asking you which system you want to boot. So how do we set it up? First, we must format the USB drive. This can be done a million ways so I'll let you do it however you want. Just make sure that you must format into a FAT or FAT32 format (depending on the size of your drive). After that you will need to go to this webpage:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/grub4dos/files/

And download both grub4dos and grubinst (grubinst is at the bottom of the page). Now unzip both of those files and take a look at grubinst first. Open the folder and run grubinst_gui.exe. At the top of the window you'll see a box to select a disk. You will need to select the disk that is your flash drive. If you don't know which one it is go to the start menu, right click My Computer, select Manage and go to Disk Management. Once you know which disk it is, select it and click install without changing any of the other settings. Once that is complete, open up the grub4dos folder and find the file grldr (it should have no extension so don't accidentally select grldr.mbr). Take grldr and copy it over to the root of your flash drive. Now to finish off add a file titled 'menu.lst' to the root of the flash drive and add all the files for your operating systems. Something important to note is that you might find that some operating systems have a boot folder with the exact same name. If this happens to be the case, just simple rename the boot folder to something like 'bootbt4' and make the appropriate adjustment to your menu.lst file. Do not combine multiple boot folders into one super boot folder.

Configuring Menu.lst

There are a lot of options when configuring your menu.lst file. The first thing you should do when making a menu.lst file is specify how you want grub4dos to look. Take for example this code:

color black/cyan yellow/cyan
timeout 60
default 0

Color specifies what color the background and text should be. Timeout is how long you want the menu to wait for you to press a button before it activates the default option which in this case is option 0 or the first one on the list. After you type that, you can start listing your options like this:

color black/cyan yellow/cyan
timeout 60
default 0

title DOS/Win9x/Me/NT/2K/XP on (hd0,0)
chainloader (hd0,0)+1
rootnoverify (hd0)

title Mandrake Linux on (hd0,7)
kernel (hd0,7)/boot/vmlinuz root=/dev/hda8 quiet devfs=mount acpi=ht vga=788
initrd (hd0,7)/boot/initrd.img

ect.

What follows the command 'title' is what grub4dos will display as the name for that option. Everything that follows is specific commands on what to do when that option is selected. The tricky thing about it is that every operating system will need its own unique commands meaning that you will have to do some searching to figure out how to get your particular operating systems to boot.

And now you are ready to go. Restart your computer, select boot from USB, and see what happens. In a later tutorial I will explain how to create a 'splashimage' so you can have an awesome picture as the background to your boot menu instead of a lame solid color. I will also post at a later date a tutorial further explaining grub4dos and more commands you can use in your menu.lst file.