Install Multiple Boot able Operating Systems on One USB

There are a few nice programs that will help you create your multiboot USB stick. Today, we’ll take a brief look at three of them: XBoot, MultiBootUSB, and YUMI.

MultiBootUSB





MultiBootUSB is available on SourceForge and appears to be a pretty popular program for just

this kind of task. The MultiBootUSB software is also a portable application, meaning you simply

put the MultiBootUSB-6.4.1.exe file onto your USB drive and run it all from the USB drive. No

need to mess around installing it on your computer. It is limited to allowing installations of

Linux-based Live distributions, however, most of the best Live CDs are Linux-based anyway.

XBoot

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One thing that you will notice is that XBoot has a lot more documentation than MultiBootUSB,

which is to say that it has some documentation. Both programs don’t really need a lot of

instruction to use, but it’s nice to have in case something happens. Installation of XBoot is

really easy; double-click the executable file and it opens in seconds. From there it’s quite

simple to add your ISOs – just drag and drop them into the main box. From there, just click on

the Create USB button. The program will prompt you to select the USB drive that you wish to

install the ISOs on, and to select the kind of bootloader that you want to use. If your USB stick

is formatted to FAT32, XBoot recommends Syslinux. If the USB stick is formatted to NTFS,

Grub4DOS is recommended. You could also select Do not install any Bootloader, but since we

want the USB stick to be bootable, I don’t see why we’d choose that. Click OK and we’re on the

way! The speed with which XBoot added the ISO files was also blindingly fast .Xboot also has

the same QEMU features, where you can boot a Live CD ISO or boot the USB that you just

made.​

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YUMI – Your Universal Multiboot Installer



Once you get to the part where you are adding distributions to your USB stick, YUMI lays

out exactly which ones are known to work, as well as where to download the distributions

from. You wouldn’t be wasting time trying to make something work that simply would never

work! There are dozens of Linux distributions and other Linux-based Live CDs listed.

At least one of them is likely to meet our needs. YUMI doesn’t have the additional QEMU

tools like MultiBootUSB or XBoot, but then again, those tools don’t seem terribly necessary.

Using the YUMI-created bootable USB drive, you will be able to boot into both images

without any issues. So, yes, YUMI does work.

Any of the three tools will help you create a USB stick that you can boot one of several

operating systems with. All things being equal, and most things were, I would recommend

XBoot over MultiBootUSB and YUMI, just for the sheer speed !!!