This package contains GRUB scripts that let you boot ISO images contained on a live medium (e.g. a USB stick). This means that you can put multiple ISO images on a single medium and boot any of them as needed.

This is different from the usual method, where you must write the contents of the ISO image to the medium, so that you need a separate medium for each distro you want to use.

Super Grub2 Disk has this ability too; in fact I gained a lot of knowledge needed to write this script by talking with those guys. If you just want to boot from ISO files, you might want to use that. However, the scripts here give you a bit more flexiblity, if you want to do other things with the USB disk too.

This requires GRUB2 version 1.99 or later.

Instructions

1. Either (a) insert your physical device (then umount all partitions, if your system does auto-mounting), or (b) create a virtual disk image file using ./imgctl create

2. Create any partitions as necessary. I suggest a separate boot partition and a data partition.

   1. For EFI booting, you will need to create yet another partition specially for EFI, FAT32-formatted; 100MB should be enough.

3. Install the bootloader:

   1. Mount the boot partition onto some $MNT directory. Let $BOOT be the mounted boot directory, which should either be $MNT/ or $MNT/boot/.

   2. Run ./imgctl install $BOOT. If it doesn't detect the device correctly, cancel it with Ctrl-C and re-run ./imgctl install $BOOT /dev/$DEVICE.

      1. You can give extra options to grub-install via the GRUB_OPTS envvar.
      2. For example, for EFI booting, you would need GRUB_OPTS="--efi-directory=$EFI" ./imgctl install $BOOT where $EFI is the path to the mounted EFI partition from 2.a.

   3. Unmount the boot partition from $MNT.

4. Install your data:

   1. Mount the data partition onto some $MNT directory. Let $DATA be the mounted data directory, which should either be $MNT/ or $MNT/boot/.

   2. Copy your ISOs to $DATA/img/

   3. (Unnecessary for most people) Copy any overrides to $DATA/linux/ and $DATA/initrd/

      • The override for XXXX.iso should be named XXXX.
      • e.g. XXXX.vmlinuz or XXXX.initrd.gz
      • e.g. Backtrack 5 needs a newer version of casper-generated /scripts/ for its initrd

   4. Umount the data partition from $MNT.

5. Use ./imgctl test <image file|device> to test it with QEMU. (Of course, install qemu if you don't already have it.)

If you get "Unsupported ISO type" for any of your ISOs, file me a bug! If this script can be modified to support it, I will do so; otherwise I will tell you to file a bug to the upstream ISO developers.

You can also try to fix the bug yourself by tweaking isodetect.cfg, or playing around with overrides in step 4.3. above.