Boot Live Disks from a Multiboot USB as an ISO

Normally when you want to boot from a USB stick you have to format it and ‘burn’ an image onto it. It is possible to make multiboot usb sticks that allow you to boot ISO image file directly. Not all live system images, like the Ubuntu desktop images, play nice with the method outlined in that post. Here is an alternative method that will allow you to boot images like Ubuntu desktop as an ISO from a multiboot stick. »

Boot ISO files from USB with grub4dos

The goal is to make a universal bootable usb device with a small boot partition and a data partition on which we’ll store the iso files. This means you can just download almost any bootable iso and boot it without having to burn a cd or unpack the iso. We’ll install grub4dos as boot loader, using the ‘triple mbr’ feature to increase the compatibility with different mainboard and BIOS configurations. We’ll be using command line linux applications to reach our goal, any distro will do. »