Multiboot flash drive

flibberdipper · September 21, 2016

I'm doing some testing with my laptop where I'm testing different OSes on it, and I'd like to use one flash drive with multiple images on it, and something where I can just copy and paste the images or something like that would be great, as I don't want to go through and delete a load of partitions. And speaking of that, this is an older laptop (around 2009-2010), so there is no fancy UEFI (just a standard Dell affair).

Anyone have ideas?

EDIT: Extra clarification: It will be a mix of Windows and Linux OSes I'm trying.

itsmyjobtoknow · September 21, 2016

Well what I am about to say may not help you a lot, I do have a bit of experience with multi-OS on a flash drive. Specifically a Corsair GTX SSD Flash Drive

Well you first need a bootloader on the flash drive itself so whenever you boot into the flash drive, you can select which OS you would like to boot into.

Although I haven't gotten this working (due to lack of time and patience at the moment) in theory you can split the flash drive up to several partition, have each partition with it's own OS (you have to install the OS onto the partition), and have a singular boot-loader (that will work with every OS) and finally have a single partition that would be able to be a shared storage between all of the OSes.

I've only gotten a single OS (Mac OS X Yosemite) and a single storage partition working on a flash drive, so take everything I've said with a grain of salt.