wish: support creating a multi-boot USB drive

balena-io / etcher

Flash OS images to SD cards & USB drives, safely and easily.

https://etcher.io/

Apache License 2.0

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wish: support creating a multi-boot USB drive #414

Open markstos opened 8 years ago

markstos commented 8 years ago

This may be outside of the scope of the project but having a single USB stick that contains multiple bootable images inside it would be very useful.

Some other projects do this, but none seem to excel at it.

jviotti commented 8 years ago

Hi @markstos ,

Thanks for the suggestion. It might be out of the scope of the core functionality provided by Etcher, but we're planning to implement a plugin framework, so users can build and distribute plugins to do all sorts of crazy workflows, like cloning drives, streaming the image file from a URL, etc; so this might be a great use case as well.

The plugin framework work has not been started yet, and it'll probably take a while to mature, but just to collect as much information as possible on this issue for when that is ready:

Do you know about a couple of applications that performs this, so we can try?
Do you happen to know how this works internally?

markstos commented 8 years ago

Here are some references for multiboot USB on Linux:

Most recently, I had trouble getting "MultiBootUSB" to work for me. I think there may have been a problem relating to BIOS vs UEFI booting. I never quite figured out why it wasn't working my case. But I've got this working in the past, and love having a single USB "rescue" stick that can hold several different Linux rescue "disks" on it was well as several different installation ISOs.

andreasmalling commented 8 years ago

There is also a great Windows example of this called YUMI which makes it possible to have a stick with both multiple Linux Distros and Windows images. http://www.pendrivelinux.com/yumi-multiboot-usb-creator/

Forage commented 7 years ago

My choice goes to YUMI at the moment as well. It's got a crude UI and I'm forced to resort to a Windows VirtualBox to use it, but it gets the job done. Multiboot as well as persistent storage (#413) for that matter. Multiboot and Linux support with an efficient UI would make me switch to Etcher right away.

dragon788 commented 7 years ago

Easy2Boot is another good example of multi booting USBs, but it is more of an ISO loading framework than an actual "flasher".

Catley94 commented 5 years ago

Any idea why everytime I use Etcher to burn an ISO to a USB that it won't make it bootable? For example if I want to burn the Windows 10 ISO onto a USB, it doesn't make it bootable, or Ubuntu etc. I've tried this with the absolute latest version of Etcher and on Windows 10/Ubuntu 18.04.

Thanks,

Sam

Forage commented 5 years ago

@Catley94 How is your issue related to this issue? Please create a separate issue for, well, different issues.

tinohager commented 2 years ago

We have tried with Ventoy to create a stick works so far well the only problem is that we can not simply download the finished image via the Etcher or the portal.