Flash Drive Multi-Boot Installer

[Verran]

I do a lot of stuff with nLite and vLite and installation automation/customization. I'm constantly reinstalling and reburning my install disks with new tweaks. So I figured I'd get two (or more) birds with one stone on this one. A good USB flash drive could be faster than an optical install (maybe? yes/no? faster than CD, slower than DVD? I don't know, actually) plus it'd be easier to customize my boot images because I wouldn't have to be burning over and over, but just rewriting the flash drive. Plus, 16GB drives are down to $15ish which is just crazy, and you could fit a lot of installers and utilities on that.

 

So I'd like to have a few Vista install images and a few XP images (some custom, some vanilla), definitely memtest, probably a plain dos boot, a live CD, and probably some other stuff too eventually. I started by trying the link in hardnrg's sig for a single USB boot image, but the software he used pukes when I do it, saying my 8GB drive is too large.

 

Has anyone done this or seen it done? Any tips? Maybe even a program to just get a single bootable image working on a USB drive as a start? One of the websites I read said you can just copy the contents of an install disc to the USB drive and it'll boot, but that's not working for me with my primary boot device set to USB drive.

[WhenKittensATK]

Not all USB drives are made equal. This Podcast show named Systm did a similar thing with a like 10 or so USB drives and only 3 would work. Their 8 GB didn't work either. I know my super older 1GB Lexar can boot up. Try a cheap USB drive instead of a larger sized one. Most of Systm's USB drives that worked were given to them for free from CES.

[Andrewr05]

One option may be to partition your drive so the program only sees a few small 2-3GB drives?

 

Also I don't know how this works in conjunction with any of the other things you are trying but hers a program to make a USB drive bootable:

HP USB Disk Storage Format Tool

 

That could be a starting platform for booting into a multi OS loader of some sort.

?

[Verran]

Not all USB drives are made equal. This Podcast show named Systm did a similar thing with a like 10 or so USB drives and only 3 would work. Their 8 GB didn't work either. I know my super older 1GB Lexar can boot up. Try a cheap USB drive instead of a larger sized one. Most of Systm's USB drives that worked were given to them for free from CES.

I have a 1GB one as well. Maybe I'll try that one and see if it'll boot. I had planned to buy a new drive for this project anyways so it's not a major loss that the 8GB might not work, but now I'm concerned because I have no idea how to know if the drive I buy is bootable.

 

One option may be to partition your drive so the program only sees a few small 2-3GB drives?

 

Also I don't know how this works in conjunction with any of the other things you are trying but hers a program to make a USB drive bootable:

HP USB Disk Storage Format Tool

That program is the same one Steve used in his guide in his sig that wouldn't work for me. I think I'll save the partitioning as a last ditch effort. I think that could make my life harder trying to figure out which partition should get the boot files and all of that. I'm hoping I won't have to do that, but I'll keep the suggestion in mind.

[Verran]

Just to update the thread, I have been successful in getting Vista and Win7 to install from a USB flash drive (OCC Guide), though only one at a time. The process doesn't work for XP for some reason, but works interchangeably for Vista/Win7. I'll be working on how to do this with XP next. Once I can get them all to work individually, I'll try for a multi-boot. That's going to be tricky though, I can tell already.

[Great_Gig]

I'm going to have a play tomorrow with Steve's USB boot drive guide and some larger flash drives (I have a selection up to 16GB). I have used it before and successfully managed to boot my ASUS board with a Kingston 1GB USB drive and an OCZ 2GB drive, but have not tried anything larger than 2GB, which is what we need for Win7 I guess?

 

I will post how I get on, as I like the idea of not wasting DVD's for testing different configurations - I really like the multi-boot idea too.

Edited March 15, 2009 by Great_Gig

[Verran]

This may prove just how insane I am with my formatting mentality, but I'm actually considering building a Vista install flash drive that's vLited and all that and just leaving it plugged into each of my main machines. One configured for each machine's desired network name and all. I'll just leave it plugged into the back USB ports and that way I'll be able to format without even digging out the DVD. Just select it from the manual boot menu when I need it.

 

Between installing Vista from USB, a good vLite configuration, a fast 4GB flash drive and my silent install scripts I bet I could have a freshly configured Vista install with all my normal programs in about a half hour. B:)

[Great_Gig]

OK, so I just used hardnrg's USB guide and setup a 4GB Corsair Flash Voyager to boot my ASUS P5Q-E and it worked fine. I then used it to boot and run a BIOS update, also fine. Next I will try and run an O/S install from the drive, but I have run out of time today. Seems it may be fine though, cannot see any reason now, why it shouldn't work?

 

Thanks Verran for the ideas, saves DVD/CD's and I can now play away with vLite & nLite

[Verran]

You're welcome. I'm glad to share whenever I can. But FYI, this is only working with Vista/Win7 for most of us so far. Jammin linked a guide to doing XP in the other thread that I haven't tried yet, but it's not a direct boot method. That kind of soured it for me, but it may still be what some people are looking for.

[fire_storm]

You're welcome. I'm glad to share whenever I can. But FYI, this is only working with Vista/Win7 for most of us so far. Jammin linked a guide to doing XP in the other thread that I haven't tried yet, but it's not a direct boot method. That kind of soured it for me, but it may still be what some people are looking for.

 

Ya thx for the program found it useful. If I can get the program to work for my needs it would work great along with setup manger and vista and windows 7 WAIK.

 

Anyways I did not know that some flash drives were not bootable. I've made a couple of bootable vista usb drives and so far haven't had any problems with getting them to boot into the vista install screen.

 

I tried making a XP bootable usb drive years ago but ran into the same problems. I looked into it and apparently when XP was being made years ago usb drives were expensive and small and not considered a viable or practical media as an installation source and that's why it was never written into XP unlike vista and windows 7 were it works so seamlessly.