Boot ISO from USB Flash Drive | USB Pen Drive Linux

Boot ISO from USB Flash Drive | USB Pen Drive Linux

BootMyISO In the following tutorial, we will show you How to Boot an ISO from a USB Flash Drive. Syslinux is used to install a MBR to your Flash Drive and make the devices partition active (bootable), GRUB is started via a syslinux.cfg file. Grub then becomes the boot loader for it's CD Emulator. We confirmed this process works by Booting the Memtest86+ ISO, and the Free DOS Image, and we even booted the Ubuntu 9.10 ISO from USB (SeeMultiBoot USB ISO). I would imagine many Linux ISO and other images would boot and run from the USB device.

How to Boot an ISO from a USB Flash Drive
The Memtest86+ ISO is included as an example, but also makes for a great tool to use for testing System Memory for problems. The FreeDOS Image is also included which may be useful for running DOS based applications or for performing firmware updates from your USB.

1. Download and run BootMyISO.exe, and follow the onscreen instructions
2. Restart your PC booting from the USB device and select Memtest86+ orFreeDOS from the Menu

If all went well, you should be running the Memtest86+ ISO or FreeDOS directly from your USB device.

Boot another ISO from your USB Flash Drive

Notice that there is a section in menu.lst that can be used to test Boot other ISOs from USB.

Using a text editor like notepad++ you can edit the menu.lst file found on the root of your USB device. For Example;

1. Simply copy the ISO you want to try to Boot to your USB Flash Drive
2. Uncomment (remove the # from the Test ISO section)
   

   # title Test ISO
   # find –set-root /testname.iso
   # map /testname.iso (hd32)
   # map –hook
   # root (hd32)
   # chainloader (hd32)

3. Change testname.iso to the name of the ISO you copied to the USB device
4. Restart your PC and choose the Test ISO boot option to see if your ISO boots from USB.

Note: If you get a Boot error stating:

Error 60: File for drive emulation must be in one contiguous disk area

This means your ISO is fragmented. You can use either of the following tools to defragment your ISO:

contig - A command line tool that can defragment ISO files.

wincontig – A GUI tool that can be used to defragment ISO files.