How do I make a USB stick from which to install different OS's?

Posted by Hanno Fietz on Super User See other posts from Super User or by Hanno Fietz
Published on 2011-02-16T14:01:15Z Indexed on 2012/12/14 5:08 UTC
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Filed under:

installation

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multi-boot

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iso-image

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usb-storage

Recently, I have made a number of USB sticks to install OS's (several Linux flavors, BSD, Windows) from, on machines that didn't have CD drives.

Now, I would prefer to not overwrite the install USB sticks all the time, since it's handy to have them, but neither do I want to pile up USB sticks that I only need every 6 months.

It would be great to have a bootable USB stick that fires up some minimal system, lets you choose an ISO image and then reboots from there. How would I go about this? Do I use some minimal Linux? Is there some kind of modified / specialized boot loader? Can I set up GRUB to do this? Should I use virtualization?

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