Can I create 3 partition on a usb flash drive and make 3 bootable installation? (Win Mac and Lin)

[Andrewxe]

Can I create 3 partition on a usb flash drive and make 3 bootable installation? (Win Mac and Lin)

[Windows7ge]

I know Windows can be booted from a thumb drive.

I know Linux can be booted from a thumb drive.

I'm going to assume it's possible to have GRUB handle booting one or the other OS.

But MacOS. This requires specific hardware support. You could virtualize it but no I don't think you'll be running it native on any PC off a thumb drive. You'd have to build a hackintosh with specific hardware.

[Bombastinator]

6 minutes ago, Windows7ge said:

I know Windows can be booted from a thumb drive.

I know Linux can be booted from a thumb drive.

I'm going to assume it's possible to have GRUB handle booting one or the other OS.

But MacOS. This requires specific hardware support. You could virtualize it but no I don't think you'll be running it native on any PC off a thumb drive. You'd have to build a hackintosh with specific hardware.

It might be possible IF it was actual Mac hardware you were running on, and IF the Mac partition was the first read.  There is actually a system called boot camp designed to do this.  The thumb drive would likely need to be built using bootcamp.

i vaguely recall doing this in fact, though on the native hard drive rather than a thumb drive and it was long ago.  A Mac used to be willing to boot from CD.  CD was set as the default boo source, and it would only boot from HD if the CD boot failed.  Slap a boot CD in any Mac and it would automatically boot from it.

[GDRRiley]

not easily.

[Bombastinator]

1 minute ago, GDRRiley said:

not easily.

Depends on the definition of easily and what bootcamp is doing these days.  I haven’t messed with OSX since snow leopard.  It used to be fairly simple.  I always ran it on Apple hardware though.  Numerous things could have changed and hackintosh could throw a giant monkey wrench at the whole thing.

[Windows7ge]

9 minutes ago, Bombastinator said:

It might be possible IF it was actual Mac hardware you were running on, and IF the Mac partition was the first read.  There is actually a system called boot camp designed to do this.  The thumb drive would likely need to be built using bootcamp.

i vaguely recall doing this in fact, though on the native hard drive rather than a thumb drive and it was long ago.  A Mac used to be willing to boot from CD.  CD was set as the default boo source, and it would only boot from HD if the CD boot failed.  Slap a boot CD in any Mac and it would automatically boot from it.

I don't know enough about Bootcamp to know what it can/can't do. I'm not certain how it interacts with drives and what it does to make them bootable.

[XAIXER]

Try E2B

[Bombastinator]

13 minutes ago, Windows7ge said:

I don't know enough about Bootcamp to know what it can/can't do. I'm not certain how it interacts with drives and what it does to make them bootable.

i don’t know either.  
My understanding is the way it used to be (which might but likely isn’t the way it still is) is that Apple motherboards were actually slightly different from PC motherboards.  There was a code key burned into a chip soldered to the motherboard.  Hackintosh figured out a way to simulate this chip.  These systems have likely changed over time.  Making OSX work on non Apple hardware seems to get more complicated with each generation. I don’t know what has to be done to an AMD64 system to make it hackintosh these days.  At its heart OSX is just a wildly customized BSD variant though.  OSX code releases have been keeping other BSDs alive for some time.

This is why I say I think it will work fine IF it’s Apple hardware.  It might be possible to make a partition that would work on a hackintosh as well, but I have no knowledge of how to go about doing it.  It would likely be, as you say, “not easily”

[Windows7ge]

13 minutes ago, Bombastinator said:

i don’t know either.  
My understanding is the way it used to be (which might but likely isn’t the way it still is) is that Apple motherboards were actually slightly different from PC motherboards.  There was a code key burned into a chip soldered to the motherboard.  Hackintosh figured out a way to simulate this chip.  These systems have likely changed over time.  Making OSX work on non Apple hardware seems to get more complicated with each generation. I don’t know what has to be done to an AMD64 system to make it hackintosh these days.  At its heart OSX is just a wildly customized BSD variant though.  OSX code releases have been keeping other BSDs alive for some time.

This is why I say I think it will work fine IF it’s Apple hardware.  It might be possible to make a partition that would work on a hackintosh as well, but I have no knowledge of how to go about doing it.  It would likely be, as you say, “not easily”

Personally I would just virtualize it all on a Linux Desktop but to each their own I suppose.

[GDRRiley]

47 minutes ago, Bombastinator said:

Depends on the definition of easily and what bootcamp is doing these days.  I haven’t messed with OSX since snow leopard.  It used to be fairly simple.  I always ran it on Apple hardware though.  Numerous things could have changed and hackintosh could throw a giant monkey wrench at the whole thing.

the last few versions have made it more and more of a pain. They would prefer you to use internet restore.

[Bombastinator]

28 minutes ago, GDRRiley said:

the last few versions have made it more and more of a pain. They would prefer you to use internet restore.

I don’t know what that even is but it sounds like cloud stuff.  

[GDRRiley]

6 minutes ago, Bombastinator said:

I don’t know what that even is but it sounds like cloud stuff.  

apple machines after 2010 are designed to network boot (nothing that special) to apples servers (rare to boot to an internet based server) to re install Mac OSX.

[Bombastinator]

6 minutes ago, GDRRiley said:

apple machines after 2010 are designed to network boot (nothing that special) to apples servers (rare to boot to an internet based server) to re install Mac OSX.

Ugh.  Must have taken some serious finagling for the hackintoshers to get around that one.  They apparently did though.

[GDRRiley]

1 minute ago, Bombastinator said:

Ugh.  Must have taken some serious finagling for the hackintoshers to get around that one.  They apparently did though.

and macos is designed to be upgraded from a running previous version. You can make a flash drive it just a pain.

[Andrewxe]

I was planning to create 3 partitions on windows on the thumb drive. Make bootable win and lin using rufus and then get over to my mac and make a bootable macos in the last partition. Will it work? 

[Bombastinator]

2 hours ago, Andrewxe said:

I was planning to create 3 partitions on windows on the thumb drive. Make bootable win and lin using rufus and then get over to my mac and make a bootable macos in the last partition. Will it work? 

The first two yes.  The second, it would depend very heavily on what machine you stuck it into.  If you made the thumb drive using bootcamp on the Mac and then stuck it into only that Mac then almost certainly.  If you stuck it into almost any other machine the first two likely would but the macOS one almost certainly not.  The problem is to make a PC hackintosh great care has to be taken with which parts are used because Apple only supports the bits it itself has used in the past. It’s such a PITA that hackintoshes are often built off formulas that have been developed by others.  The chances that a random PC just happens to be hackintoshable are quite low.

[Andrewxe]

3 hours ago, Bombastinator said:

The first two yes.  The second, it would depend very heavily on what machine you stuck it into.  If you made the thumb drive using bootcamp on the Mac and then stuck it into only that Mac then almost certainly.  If you stuck it into almost any other machine the first two likely would but the macOS one almost certainly not.  The problem is to make a PC hackintosh great care has to be taken with which parts are used because Apple only supports the bits it itself has used in the past. It’s such a PITA that hackintoshes are often built off formulas that have been developed by others.  The chances that a random PC just happens to be hackintoshable are quite low.

I have both PC and Macbook. Planning to create Lin and Win using Rufus on Windows and then MacOS using DiskDrill on mac