Several ISO's on one USB stick

[Nils Kassube]

Petter Adsen wrote:
> Is it possible to have several ISO images on one USB stick, and a boot
> menu to choose which one to boot from?

Yes.

> Does anyone know of a tool for
> Linux that can do this? I've found something that seems to do this,
> but it's only for Windows.

I don't know a special tool for it.

> It would be really convenient to have a USB stick with a few different
> Ubuntu images and other diagnostics tools, etc.
> 
> I'm guessing that it is possible to set up GRUB to do this in some
> way, but I don't know it well enough to know how.
> 
> Even if such a tool doesn't exist, I'd be really happy to get any tips
> on how to approach this with, for instance, GRUB.

My USB stick looks like this: It is formatted with FAT32 so that I can
also easily use it with Windows machines. IIRC I partitioned it with
gparted to get some extra space at the beginning for the grub files.
fdisk shows this layout:

Disk /dev/sdc: 8000 MB, 8000110592 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 972 cylinders, total 15625216 sectors
Units = sectors of 1 * 512 = 512 bytes
Sector size (logical/physical): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
I/O size (minimum/optimal): 512 bytes / 512 bytes
Disk identifier: 0x000e95bf

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sdc1   *       16065    15615179     7799557+   b  W95 FAT32

On the stick I have a /isos folder where the images are stored.
Furthermore I have installed GRUB to the stick to make it bootable and
in /boot/grub I have a grub.cfg file like this:

set timeout=10
set default=0

menuentry "Boot from harddisk (hd0)" {
 insmod chain
 set root=(hd0)
 chainloader +1
}

menuentry "Kubuntu 14.04 amd64" {
 loopback loop /isos/kubuntu-14.04-desktop-amd64.iso
 linux (loop)/casper/vmlinuz.efi boot=casper iso-scan/filename=/isos/kubuntu-14.04-desktop-amd64.iso noeject noprompt debian-installer/language=de keyboard-configuration/layoutcode=de --
 initrd (loop)/casper/initrd.lz
}

menuentry "Kubuntu 14.04 i386" {
 loopback loop /isos/kubuntu-14.04-desktop-i386.iso
 linux (loop)/casper/vmlinuz boot=casper iso-scan/filename=/isos/kubuntu-14.04-desktop-i386.iso noeject noprompt debian-installer/language=de keyboard-configuration/layoutcode=de --
 initrd (loop)/casper/initrd.lz
}


This doesn't start the images with the start menu from the image though.
Therefore I had to find out the extra boot options for the language and
keyboard. Otherwise it would use the default. In the past the linux line
was a bit different, so it may also change for newer versions than
14.04.


Nils