If you work in IT or offer your own IT services, you probably install and reinstall operating systems for clients quite often. Traditionally, operating system installations have been done directly from the OS installation disc, but since discs are very easily scratched or damaged, most IT pros use USB drives. This is a more efficient method, but it has the same disadvantage as using discs.
In general, USB drives are more reliable and efficient than drives, but like drives, most USB drives are only for one purpose. Since each client may have different operating system preferences, you may need to deploy several different operating systems at random times. For example, one client may need a clean install of Windows 7 Ultimate, while another client may need you to install Ubuntu for it.
This usually includes multiple USB drives, you can have a Windows 7 boot disk, an Ubuntu boot disk, a CentOS boot disk, etc. If you want to reduce the usage of all disks, you can combine your boot OSs into one. A USB stick that can be used to deploy several different operating systems.
Create a bootable multi-boot flash drive
There are several ways to configure your USB drive to boot multiple operating systems, but one of the easiest ways is to use the YUMI program. So, to get started, head over to the YUMI downloads page and proceed to download the most recent version.
– /
Once the download is complete, proceed to launch the software. You will be presented with the following screen:
As described, the first step is to select a drive letter for your USB device. Windows typically requires you to select the E: drive, but this may differ depending on how you structure your Windows drives. So, start by connecting your USB drive to your computer and navigate to Start Computer. This will give you an overview of all of your active drives, where you can simply determine the drive letter for your USB stick.
As you can see from the above screenshot, Windows has identified the USB drive as a removable drive (E :). Again, your USB drive may be assigned a different letter depending on the Windows settings and the other devices you are using (external hard drives, USB drives, etc.).
Given the above information in the Computer pane, you can now select your USB drive in YUMI. Step 1. Select a drive
Then in the list Step 2: you will need to select your first distro to add to the USB stick. The YUMI software comes with several distributions, from standard Linux ISO installation files to custom utilities. For this tutorial, we’ll just choose the default Windows 8 installation:
Once you have selected a distribution from the list, you will need to navigate to the actual ISO file (step 3) for that distribution. It can be an ISO image that you downloaded, or an ISO file that you created or copied from disc. For this tutorial, I have selected the Windows 8 Consumer Release ISO.
Finally, click the “Create” button to make the ISO bootable and save it to your USB drive. From here the YUMI app will process and start building the bootable distribution.
When the process is complete, click the Next button and the following window will open:
From here, you can simply click the “Yes” button, which will take you back to the YUMI start page, where you can add another bootable distribution by following the steps above.
Once you’ve finished setting up your USB drive with all boot options, you just need to restart your computer and boot from the USB drive. From there, you will be presented with the YUMI interface, which will allow you to choose the distribution to download.
That’s all. Now you can use one USB stick from which you can boot multiple distributions and programs! While this guide is intended to create a bootable USB drive capable of booting multiple operating systems, YUMI can also be used to download standalone antivirus software, disk cloning utilities, diagnostics, and other utilities. Thank you for visiting the site for today’s posting. If any of our site visitors know of any programs similar to YUMI, feel free to link to them in the comments section. Enjoy!
–