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Dual-Boot USB Stick

DnFx91
By DnFx91
in Storage Devices
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It's not what you think. I always carry with me 2 USB sticks, one with clonezilla, the other with Pmagic, i want to put them both on separate partitions of a single USB stick and have them both selectable from boot menus.

 

Thus far i have established that Windows really doesnt like assigning drive letters to multiple partitions from the same physical drive (external), in fact it seems to simply break partition editor. 

 

I've gotten as far as using gparted to partition the stick in half, and then copied all files from each bootable into their respective partitions. But when trying to boot it on a machine, there is what appears to be a corrupted UEFI entry which doesnt lead anywhere other than the "no bootable devices" message.

 

Is it at all possible to do this with removable media ? I'm inclined to think there is a way, as i have and i'm sure you have also seen many an OEM laptop where the recovery partition has a drive letter out of the box. So windows can definitely do this, i think it just decides not to when it comes to removable media.

Home PC:

CPU: i7 4790s ~ Motherboard: Asus B85M-E ~ RAM: 32GB Ballistix Sport DDR3 1666 ~ GPU: Sapphire R9 390 Nitro ~ Case: Corsair Carbide Spec-03 ~ Storage: Kingston Predator 240GB   PCIE M.2 Boot, 2TB HDD, 3x 480GB SATA SSD's in RAID 0 ~ PSU:    Corsair CX600
Display(s): Asus PB287Q , Generic Samsung 1080p 22" ~ Cooling: Arctic T3 Air Cooler, All case fans replaced with Noctua NF-B9 Redux's ~ Keyboard: Logitech G810 Orion ~ Mouse: Cheap Microsoft Wired (i like it) ~ Sound: Radial Pro USB DAC into 250w Powered Speakers ~ Operating System: Windows 10 Enterprise x64
 

Work PC:

CPU: Intel Xeon E3 1275 v3 ~ Motherboard: Asrock E3C226D2I ~ RAM: 16GB DDR3 ~ GPU: GTX 460 ~ Case: Silverstone SG05 ~ Storage: 512GB SATA SSD ~ Displays: 3x1080p 24" mix and matched Dell monitors plus a 10" 1080p lilliput monitor above ~ Operating System: Windows 10 Enterprise x64

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As far as the partitioning goes, Windows will only see one partition of a USB flash drive. I would think there's something like Hiren's Boot CD that could be put on a USB drive with the utilities you need. 

Main System: Phobos

AMD Ryzen 7 2700 (8C/16T), ASRock B450 Steel Legend, 16GB G.SKILL Aegis DDR4 3000MHz, AMD Radeon RX 570 4GB (XFX), 960GB Crucial M500, 2TB Seagate BarraCuda, Windows 10 Pro for Workstations/macOS Catalina

 

Secondary System: York

Intel Core i7-2600 (4C/8T), ASUS P8Z68-V/GEN3, 16GB GEIL Enhance Corsa DDR3 1600MHz, Zotac GeForce GTX 550 Ti 1GB, 240GB ADATA Ultimate SU650, Windows 10 Pro for Workstations

 

Older File Server: Yet to be named

Intel Pentium 4 HT (1C/2T), Intel D865GBF, 3GB DDR 400MHz, ATI Radeon HD 4650 1GB (HIS), 80GB WD Caviar, 320GB Hitachi Deskstar, Windows XP Pro SP3, Windows Server 2003 R2

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