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Multi ISO boot on USB Drive?

dan-ger-ous

dan-ger-ous

VIP Member
This has been a puzzling situation for me over the past few days. My aim is to create a bootable USB which will boot the installation of XP Service Pack 2 (iso) and Acronis True Home Image (Rescue software, also an iso). Sometimes swapping CD's in and out of the drive just becomes abit to much of a handful, booting from USB will be alot quicker, i know the factor of motherboard compatibility is an issue here, my PC does support booting from USB. I've used the program GRUB to make a bootable USB stick and did succeed, on the laptop the Acronis true home image iso booted with no issues, but the XP SP2 would cause some hardware error and the installation would abort. With the PC i was getting a totally new error, not allowing me to boot at all when it was previously working on the laptop! Not really sure why there isnt an easy install guide out there, everything seems to be in a huge bundle package away somewhere and its hard to find the right info.

Has anyone managed to dual boot iso's on their USB Drives?
 
I've managed to dual boot between xp and vista by making a partition on the hard drive before with the help of easy bcd but i havent done a bootable usb before.
Would like to know more about this myself.

Is it possible on the xp side of things that it may need a third party driver for it to install onto the HDD maybe?

Edit: sure it doesnt need to install to the hdd, my mistake.

Not sure what might be happening there sorry :(

2nd edit :) have a look here dan, there seems to be alot too it but it might just work

Code: 
http://www.ngine.de/article/id/8
 
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Ahhh.. right axxxo, thanks for the response. The situation is that, i've recently bought a netbook, and as you know it doesnt come with a CD Drive. It comes with Windows 7 Starter pre-installed but i'm really fond of reverting back to XP since it'll be alive for a few more years. :) I run Acronis True Home image to make a clone of the drive, both for my current laptop and PC, and i'd wish to do it for the netbook to incase i suffer some sort of nightmare later down the road. :) The Acronis True Home Image iso seems to work with the GRUB4DOS tutorial. The procedures out there for making a multi boot usb drive are just overly completely and still dont guarantee that the USB will work. :(

What i want is to, run the installation of XP itself, so instead of using a CD i'll use my USB just to install XP onto the netbook and not the USB itself. Then to be able to run the Acronis iso to be able to boot into the Acronis OS to be able to do a full back up of the drive. Without a CD Drive available, have no option but to use the USB drive. :(

Something like a loader like the following:
TR_DualBootD_543x469.gif


Been wanting to do this for a while now, but the tutorials really do put you off. :(
 
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Ah i get ya now, so you do need to install to the hdd, maybe there is a way to install/add the driver for the hdd or is it an ssd that the netbook has to the xp installation folder so it finds it maybe.

If it is an ssd that its on the netbook ive seen a couple of topics based on making xp ssd friendly you might want to look into.
I would imagine this one's gonna be a pain in the backside for you! lol
 
Lmao, most certainly is going to be a pain. At the moment im looking to format the entire 250GB HDD space and just make a 70GB vs 180GB partition. Ive spent the last few days trying to get this USB dual boot to work, or even atleast try to get XP to work, but the process is just to long and complicated, might just invest in a USB CD Drive if it doesnt get sorted soon. :) My computer and laptop are fairly old, so hopefully the netbooks hardware/BIOS will probably let me install it without any problems. Havent wiped my USB Drive just yet, going to wait till tomorrow as its due to arrive. :p Right now, i'm off to sleep. :) Thanks for your input axxxo. 👍
 
I'm doing exactly what you are trying to do with my netbook but I use two USB pen drives & one USB external drive.

One pen drive contains the Acronis bootable image including Acronis Disk Director (Created from within Acronis itself) and the second contains the XP installation.

Once the XP install is done once from the USB drive I then booted from the Acronis USB pen & created my backup image to a third party USB external drive.

Now in the event of a disaster I boot from the Acronis USB pen drive, once booted I plug in the third party USB external drive with the image (Acronis detects it after a mo) I then restore the image.

Have you looked at THIS?

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Cheers G, I'll have to re-install Acronis again to make the bootable USB as i uninstalled the program once i had burned the rescue CD. I'm limited to one USB Drive at the moment, if i were to use too, i'd probably have to format it again because i'd need it for data storage later on. I've downloaded WinFlash on my PC last night but didnt get to try it out, i'll do that today and see how it goes if the other USB (GRUB4DOS) fails on the netbook which will be arriving later on today. Hmm, if only there was a way to dual boot these isos from one USB Drive. Have a 1GB memstick and it'd be great if that were possible. If not i will resort to Win2Flash, and then just use the 1GB memory stick and leave the bootable Acronis ISO image on their because realistically i wont be needing XP install again once the acronis backup image is all made right? 👍
 
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