… there was a LiveCD. Then, there was dd and USB sticks. Now, there are a few GUI options out there to help you go from Live ISO to LiveUSB stick. However, only a few will help you do multiple distros on the same stick; xboot and yumi come to mind, but they’re windows only.

Having recently come into an extra 64GB USB Thumb Drive (Sandisk Cruzer), I figured I finally have time / space to create a multiboot USB stick that will allow me to “be prepared” with both Live environments and install capabilities. I managed to cram all of the following into a single USB stick with a single GRUB2 menu:

Darick’s Boot and Nuke (DBAN)

SystemRescueCD

Backtrack 5R3 KDE (32 and 64)

Fedora 17 KDE Live (32 and 64)

Fedora 17 LXDE Live (32 and 64)

Fedora 17 XFCE Live (32 and 64)

Ubuntu 12.04 Live (32 and 64)

CentOS 6.3 DVD1 (32 and 64)

I feel like this thumb drive has me prepared for the following situations:

Fixing PCs at family events (it’s inevitable)

Installing CentOS on spare PCs for use as servers or occasionally, on the fileserver which had a bad disk for root

Theoccasional forray into BackTrack, which is a lot of fun to play with

Creating more unordered lists on a blog

Click below and I’ll share what I’ve learned, some examples, and even the current grub.cfg.