drag & drop ISO's to multiboot USB with easy2boot

vibe666

for anyone who does/uses a lot of OS builds and is fed up of doing multiple bootable usb sticks (you're not still using CD's/DVD's are you???) every time, I found a great little tool called Easy2Boot that is able to create a bootable USB stick mount multiple ISO's and other disk images using a sinple menu interface.

http://www.easy2boot.com/

You literally just create a bootable USB stick using the tool, then all you have to do is drag and drop your disk images right onto the right windows/linux etc. folder on the usb drive once you've created it with E2B and it will let you choose which disk image to continue the boot from, and off you go!

you are then free to add/remove images via your OS or file explorer of choice at any time in the future as they become available/obsolete without having to dick around re-doing the USB stick,

There's lots of options for customisation too, which i'm sure the uber nerds will love.

been looking for something like this since i saw a made had a usb hard drive with built in bootable iso mounting a couple of years back, but all of them fell short of what i wanted to do with them until now.

yoyo

Looks great, cheers for sharing vibe666!

Nick

Fysh

Sounds promising - I've used YUMI before and it's grand but not drag-and-drop, you have to run it each time you want to add or remove an ISO. So an easier alternative sounds good.

(Mind you, in a networked environment a PXE server is still the way to go. I was reading something about modding WDS to add Linux boot capability there recently and it sounds interesting, though a bit fiddly...)

unkel

I've been looking for something like this for many years, tried everything going, wasn't happy with any of them and then I just gave up. Must have been before this little gem was around

Here are basic instructions for any of you who want to test this quickly without having to sit through YouTube clips or read long webpages etc. Here goes:

1. Download zip file and unzip onto your PC
2. Run MAKE_E2B_USB_DRIVE (run as admin).cmd and follow instructions. This creates the bare Easy2Boot USB
3. Copy any Linux ISO directly into the MAINMENU directory on the USB
4. Copy any Windows ISO directly into its own subdirectory (these are pre-defined) of the WINDOWS directory on the USB

Tried it with an ancient 4GB USB stick. Copied 3 ISOs (2 Linux and 1 Windows), booted into each one of the 3 successfully

Many, many thanks, vibe666

ED E

Oh that is nice. My many stick keyring can now get a lot smaller.

unkel

That's what I'm doing right now

So far have about 12 Windows installations, 6 or 7 linux boots and all the stuff I normally carry on my main stick

All-in-one-stick happy days

Zimmerframe

Used Unibootin and Rufus lately and they both had problems booting a little Lenovo netbook, I have. Tried this with with the same iso and works first time.
Cheers OP..

vibe666

yeah, i've been stunned by how well it works, 8i think we've probably all been looking for something like this since the first days of the windows 7 usb installer, and i've used them all over the years and each one has it's annoyances, but i've tried this one with windows, different linux distros, UBCD etc. and aside from those few older machines that just refuse to boot from any usb at all and will only boot from CD/DVD, it's managed every single one without a hitch.

having said that, the hard drive i saw with an iso booting function has a physical switch on the box and a single iso folder and boots the ISO itself as a DVD/CD with hardware emulation (like those secure usb sticks with an extra autorun CD/DVD partition for loading encrypted partitions). that would be great, but i'll take E2B as a win for now.

ED E

1. Free BSD - Working to FS menu
2. Kali - Working to FS menu
3. Mint - Working
4. Ubuntu - Working
5. PCBSD - Working to FS menu
6. Spinrite......
7. Windows......

Still testing it but seems very promising.

Decided to make use of my spare hardware:

• Toshiba 128GB mSATA SSD
• Cheapo mSATA UASP enclosure

So that's 400MB/s read and 350MB/s write If everything goes to plan this could be a very powerful little troubleshooting tool.

demanufactured

Looks like a fantastic tool.....always wanted someth8ng like this.

Frank Grimes

Thanks for the recommendation vibe666. Just tried this out quickly on the laptop I'm on now using a few Linux distros and it works great.

Morrisseeee

Great find, super program.
It's worked for me with : GParted, Lubuntu, my customised Fedora, UBCD & rancheros.
/just drag-n-drop

unkel

Morrisseeee wrote: »

Great find, super program.
It's worked for me with : GParted, Lubuntu, my customised Fedora, UBCD & rancheros.
/just drag-n-drop

Several programs could handle multiple Linux distros on a stick before, but not really a combo of Windows and Linux!

Glad it does the trick for ya though

Skerries

anybody get a slipstreamed Windows disk working?
I am having awful problems with windows updates on our network and was having problems as well with the convenience rollup