"Multiboot USB - Boot any ISO file in one USB drive"
In past, I would make a bootable usb drive from the archlinux ISO for installation purposes and forget which I put it. On one occasion, I had a boot issue and needed to "rescue" the archlinux. Because I could not find the archlinux usb drive, I had to download the ISO and make another boot device.
This week I heard about a software tool called Ventoy from the Late Night Linux podcast. It will allow multiple ISO to reside in one usb drive and it will create a menu list upon boot for the user to choose the specific ISO to boot. It supports both Windows and Linux environments and the default filesystem it uses for the storage partition in the usb is the exFAT filesystem. Of course you can reformat this storage partition to any other linux file system of your choice. You just copy into the storage partition the ISOs and boot the usb drive to use any one of them.
One caveat is that only ISOs that support UEFI boot can be used. For example, this Ultimate Boot CD iso did not boot as it did not support UEFI boot.
Use a USB 3.0 usb drive for more tolerable boot speed and the appropriate size for all the ISOs you want to put in it.
Here is my list of ISOs for OS rescue, system test, partition sizing, disk cloning and general troubleshooting.
- Almalinux 8.4 RHEL 8.4 clone
- Centos 7 RHEL 7 clone
- Archlinux A very very up to date linux distribution
- Rescatux is a Debian-based live distribution featuring a graphical wizard for rescuing broken GNU/Linux and Windows installations and boot loaders.
- SystemRescue Archlinux based rescue toolkit.
- Gparted Manage disk partitions ( create,delete, resize, copy, and move partitions without data loss)
- Clonezilla is a partition and disk imaging/cloning program similar to True Image® or Norton Ghost®. It helps you to do system deployment, bare metal backup and recovery.
- PCmemtest memory tester is based on a fork and rewrite of Memtest86+