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installing multiple OSes on usb drive

TheBean
By TheBean
in Operating Systems
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I have a large usb drive (128gb).  am thinking of installing multiple linux distros onto it. if I split the drive into many difference drives using windows disk management and split them into 16gb partitions, how would I let the system know which distro to boot when I plug it into my computer?

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You need a bootloader on the disk. Most Linux distros include GRUB already for that. Don't bother even using Windows Disk Management for that, use the disk management tools included in the distro installers.

 

On the other hand though, flash drives are not the best for this. Flash drives are not that fast and they are quite limited in how many times you can write to them.

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Posted
25 minutes ago, Saksham said:

I have a large usb drive (128gb).  am thinking of installing multiple linux distros onto it. if I split the drive into many difference drives using windows disk management and split them into 16gb partitions, how would I let the system know which distro to boot when I plug it into my computer?

https://www.pendrivelinux.com/yumi-multiboot-usb-creator/

Need YUMI or whatever it is, never actually used it.

I edit my posts a lot, Twitter is @LordStreetguru just don't ask PC questions there mostly...
 

Spoiler

 

What is your budget/country for your new PC?

 

what monitor resolution/refresh rate?

 

What games or other software do you need to run?

 

 

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  • 1 month later...
Posted

When you do this the Linux Distribution will install a boot-loader called GRUB, in the installer you do need to specify that you want the boot-loader to be installed on the USB stick, and to answer how you would boot to different distributions, it will show that in GRUB when you boot

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On 10/27/2019 at 10:40 PM, Saksham said:

I have a large usb drive (128gb).  am thinking of installing multiple linux distros onto it. if I split the drive into many difference drives using windows disk management and split them into 16gb partitions, how would I let the system know which distro to boot when I plug it into my computer?

I did similar before but that was using a very slow stick. You're probably using a somewhat faster one, I guess?

I am using a flash now with small boot partition and btrfs (compressed) partition, using subdirectories with ready-to-use installs.

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