Could i put several operating systems on a usb stick?

[mrteabag]

Thinking of buying(might already have one somewhere) an 8gb usb stick and putting xp,vista and 7 on it.It would be handy if when you booted the usb stick,you could just choose which os you wanted to install.
Just wondering

 

[Kennysevenfold]

Not sure tbh, would ask this to be moved to the software section, see what peoples say on there.

 

[mrteabag]

Oh,sorry about that.

 

[Kennysevenfold]

Pretty sure you cant dual/triple boot a usb anyway, but i would ask for confirmation mate.

 

[mrteabag]

I can dream

 

[Kennysevenfold]

I can dream

or buy another 2 usb drives? only cost pennies nowadays lol

 

[mrteabag]

Might just have to do that mate,thanks

 

[Locke]

You would need to partition it somehow and I'm not sure how it well it would work anyway, considering the sizes of the latter operating systems.

The real question is: Why would you want Vista when you have W7?

If you do buy another, just have XP on one and W7 on the other ^^

 

[Moeks]

Using multiple USB drives would be the most straight-forward way to do this yes, but what I 'think' you might be able to do is make a bootable USB stick using something like Caldera DrDos and then boot to a command prompt and execute the setup for the Windows variety of your choice ...or what is more likely to work would be to complie a bootable USB stick with the Windows Preinstallation Environment and do it via that.

I don't know if this will work or not, I'm just spitballing really, but it might.

 

[arknor]

should be possible you would just need to execute the setup exe for the os you want to install you could do it in dos if you manually typed the location, so making a program that lets you choose which one to install via a menu must be fairly easy

i remember installing windows 2000 from dos before by typing where the setup exe was (was from having windows 2000 exctrated onto a hdd aswell as it was much faster than installing from a cd)

 

[Sayso]

8gb will not be big enough for the iso files, i tried to get W7, Vista and XP onto a 16GB.

 

[mrteabag]

8gb will not be big enough for the iso files, i tried to get W7, Vista and XP onto a 16GB.

Could use vlite or something similar,thats not the problem really

 

[mrteabag]

Found a way to do it with linux if anyone is interested.

http://www.pendrivelinux.com/boot-multiple-iso-from-usb-multiboot-usb/

 

[thingemajib]

you'd need a bigger memory stick, but i could see this working in principal.

 

[reflux]

Just install 7 and grab Windows XP Mode.

 

[mrteabag]

Might have a go at the linux one later and see could i do something similar with windows myself

 

[Moeks]

Just install 7 and grab Windows XP Mode.

I don't see how that helps at all, you have no idea why he wants to do what he said, it may very well not be for the same system anyway.

 

[PermaBanned]

Easily, just partition it like a hard drive and look at what distros offer USB booting. Should be able to add a GRUB menu on boot.

Oh, you want Windows? Move along.

 

[mrteabag]

Easily, just partition it like a hard drive and look at what distros offer USB booting. Should be able to add a GRUB menu on boot.

Oh, you want Windows? Move along.

Why im trying to do it with linux

I don't see how that helps at all, you have no idea why he wants to do what he said, it may very well not be for the same system anyway.

Ha yeah,some people are like that.
'How do you..'
'Why would you want to do that anyway?'

 

[PermaBanned]

Why im trying to do it with linux

In which case yeah, just partition it and put the bootable USB image on each of the partitions. If you actually wanted to install them then you'd have to look for specific distros which support that i believe.