Multi-CD USB stick
Well I'm not sure the title speaks for itself...
Live CDs are great and USB sticks have amazing capacities (I'm curious how it'll sound in a couple of years...)
I've bought a 6Gb USB "stick", actually it's a HD in a credit-card format.
The idea is to bring on it and be able to boot:
- Knoppix DVD v5.1.1
- and memtest
- and DOS (from balder.img) That one fails on my laptop :-(
- FCCU CD v11.0
- DBAN v1.0.7
- Etch installer from boot.img.gz
So I use a single syslinux with a huge configuration file.
Sometimes there are some clashes between the files of the various systems so we've to rename some when possible and choose between some when not possible.
- syslinux.cfg and isolinux.cfg => merge all and rename some of the targets if needed
- boot.* => choose one image (I took the Debian spiral from Etch installer) and one text (I list shortly the main targets)
- F1..F10 help screens => choose or mix
From Etch: this is really the basis of the install, with its syslinux
- debian-testing-i386-netinst.iso renamed as: debian.iso
- disk.lbl
- f1.txt .. f10.txt
- initrd26.gz
- initrdg.gz
- initrd.gz
- ldlinux.sys (install it properly as a bootable USB stick!)
- linux
- linux26
- splash.rle
From DBAN (dban-1.0.7_i386.ima):
- dbanlog
- dbanseed
- *.txt => dbaninfo/
- initrd.gz renamed as: initrddb.gz
- kernel.bzi
From Knoppix DVD:
- knoppix/
- balder.img
- linux renamed as: linux-kn
- memtest
- minirt.gz
From FCCU:
- knoppix/ renamed as: fccu/
- linux renamed as: lin-fccu
- minirt.gz renamed as: minifccu.gz (cf note)
Note: For FCCU as we had to rename the directory and as v11 is incompatible with knoppix dvd v5.1.1 I had to change minifccu.gz:
gunzip minifccu.gz mount -o loop minifccu /mnt/disk
Edit /mnt/disk/linuxrc and prepend the module list by the new path: (but keep the rest!)
MODULE_DIRS="/cdrom/fccu/modules /cdrom/KNOPPIX/modules ...