But what to do if you have several computers or laptops at home with different operating systems installed. Or friends often ask to reinstall Windows or install it new version. Create every time bootable USB flash drive Of course you can. You can also buy several flash drives and install various programs on them. But it’s much easier to choose this option - creating a multiboot flash drive with different versions Windows and utilities. This will be discussed in this article.
What you need
So, what do you need for this? Of course, you must have all the necessary ISO images that you want to burn onto it: various operating systems and utilities. This could be Windows XP, 7, 8 and others; Dr.Web LiveCD or Kaspersky Rescue Disk– to scan your computer for viruses, Victoria – to fix hard drive errors, Acronis Disk Director – to division of hard disk into partitions and others. You can download them from the Internet, or make images from disks, you can read about this by following the link.
You will also need special program, with which we will create a multiboot flash drive, and, of course, the USB drive itself. Choose its volume based on what you will be recording. If this is a set of different programs, 1-4 GB will be enough. If you want to make a multiboot flash drive with multiple OSes and add programs to it, take a flash drive with a memory capacity of 8 GB or more.
As an example, in this article we will make a multiboot flash drive with Windows 8 and the Victoria program. I took a 4 GB flash drive. We will use the free program WinSetupFromUSB.
Downloading the required utility
You can download the program from the official website. Write “WinSetupFromUSB” in the search engine and follow the link shown in the figure below.
We will download the latest version of the program at the time of writing. Follow the appropriate link.
Click on the blue “Download” button.
Formatting a flash drive
The next thing we will do is format the flash drive using standard Windows tools, which will be bootable. Copy the necessary files from it, as all information from the device will be completely deleted.
Insert it into your computer or laptop, and you need to use a USB 2.0 port. Go to “Computer”, right-click on it and select from context menu "Format".
An information window will appear informing you that all data will be destroyed, click OK.
When the USB drive is formatted, a corresponding window will open. Click “OK” in it and close the format utility.
Operating system entry
Unpack the downloaded archive with the WinSetupFromUSB program and run the file “WinSetupFromUSB_1-6”.
First of all, let’s write an image with the Windows 8 operating system onto our multiboot flash drive.
In the program window, in the section, select the flash drive that we formatted. In the “Add to USB disk” section, check the box « Windows Vista/7/8/10/Server 2008/2012 based ISO"
An Explorer window will open. Find the desired image on your computer, in the example this is the image of the Windows 8 operating system, and click “Open”.
Click "GO".
After the process is completely completed, the “Job done” window will appear.
I only have a 4 GB flash drive, so I won’t be able to write many operating systems onto it. If you need to add Windows Vista, 7, 10 to a multiboot flash drive, repeat all the steps described above. To add Windows XP, in the “Add to USB disk” section, check the box "Windows 2000/XP/2003 Setup". Each time, select the same flash drive on which you recorded images earlier.
Recording programs
Now let's add a program to the multiboot flash drive to check and fix Victoria hard drive errors.
Run WinSetupFromUSB and in the section "USB disk selection and format tools" select our flash drive. Next, in the “Add to USB disk” section, put a tick in the box "Linux ISO/Other Grub4dos compatible ISO" and click on the button with three dots.
Through Explorer, find the program image on your computer and click Open. Then an information window will appear, click “OK” in it, or it will disappear itself after 10 seconds.
Click “GO” and wait for the program to be written to the flash drive.
To add other programs you need to the multiboot flash drive, repeat all the steps described above. Select the desired utility image each time.
Examination
After you add all the images of operating systems and programs to the flash drive, let's look at the result - open the boot menu of the flash drive in the QEMU virtual machine.
To do this, in the program window, click on the “Refresh” button, then check the “Test in QEMU” box and click “GO”.
You can see what the boot menu looks like after each addition of an OS or program to the flash drive.
In the example, the boot menu of the flash drive looks like this. The USB flash drive contains Windows 8 OS and the Victoria program. You will see a different list depending on what you upload to it.
Multiboot flash drive - a bootable flash drive with several operating systems and utilities located on one USB drive. Booting from external USB devices, the user can use different Windows or Linux operating systems, boot disks from antivirus manufacturers, boot disks for programs such as Acronis, a Windows PE boot disk, utilities, etc.
It is convenient to have several systems on one USB drive at once or to create a special flash drive with a set of necessary software (USB flash drive - resuscitator). A bootable flash drive with multiple OSes can be created in different combinations: a multiboot flash drive with several OSes and additional utilities, with one operating system and a set of software, with various boot disks, etc.
A multiboot flash drive is used on a computer in the following cases:
- installation of the Windows or Linux operating system;
- reinstalling the operating system;
- System Restore;
- treating your computer for viruses;
- carrying out the necessary work in the operating system using special utilities.
All this can be done using a regular bootable USB flash drive, with the exception of the possibility of using several operating systems at once. The user can independently create a multiboot flash drive using programs that support the creation of such USB storage device y.
In this article, to create a multiboot flash drive, you will use free program WinSetupFromUSB, which does not require installation on your computer. We have already created the Windows operating system in WinSetupFromUSB.
Download the program from the official website. Unpack the self-extracting archive with the program on your computer. The application is launched from a folder, after double-clicking on a file, separate for 32-bit or 64-bit bit versions Windows operating system (read how to find out the system bit depth).
Multiboot Windows flash drive in WinSetupFromUSB
Let's create a multiboot flash drive with multiple Windows operating systems and boot disks.
Usually, on modern computers the UEFI interface is used (instead of BIOS) with a GPT partition table (instead of MBR). For such computers, the choice of file system for a flash drive is important. To boot into UEFI from a flash drive, the FAT32 file system is required, because the computer will not see a flash drive formatted as a file NTFS system.
For flash drives formatted in FAT32, the file size should not exceed 4 GB. Therefore, you will have to use images smaller than 4 GB. If you are using images larger than 4 GB, format the flash drive to the NTFS file system. In this case, you will not depend on the size of the files; the flash drive will boot on most computers.
The WinSetupFromUSB program supports images larger than 4 GB in the FAT32 file system. When creating a bootable USB flash drive, a large file is split into parts.
Connect the flash drive to the USB connector of the computer. The USB flash drive must be large enough to add several operating system images or utilities to the flash drive.
- Run the WinSetupFromUSB program.
- Check the “Auto format it with FBinst” settings option to format the flash drive. Select FAT file system
- In the “Add to USB disk” section, select the appropriate item; in our case, I chose “Windows Vista / 7 / 8 / 10 / Server 2008/2012 based ISO”. You need to check the box and then specify the path to the operating system image. I selected the Windows operating system image
- To start recording the image to the flash drive, you need to click on the “GO” button.
- In two alternate windows that open with warnings about deleting files on the flash drive and about choosing a file system, click on the “Yes” button.
- After the recording process is completed, a message indicating the completion of the work will appear in the window: “Job done.”
The Windows 7 operating system is stored on a flash drive.
Attention! When writing the following systems, boot disks or utilities to a flash drive, you do not need to check the “Auto format it with FBinst” checkbox, because there is no longer a need to format the flash drive.
In the item “Windows Vista / 7 / 8 / 10 / Server 2008/2012 based ISO” I added an image of the Windows 10 operating system larger than 4 GB.
Please be aware that WinSetupFromUSB does not support two-in-one shared images consisting of both 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Windows in the same image. Separately 32-bit or 64-bit operating system images are supported, which may include several editions of Windows of the same bit level.
After this, a window opened with a warning that the file will be split into parts for use in the FAT32 file system. We must agree with this.
Then click on the "GO" button.
Once the file copying process is complete, add the following image.
I activated the “Linux ISO/Other ISO Grub4dos compatible ISO” option, and then added the boot disk image Acronis True Image, based on the Linux operating system.
In the window that opens, edit the name (if necessary) that will be displayed in the boot menu.
Press the “GO” button and wait for the copying to finish.
Finally, I will add a bootable rescue disk of Kaspersky Anti-Virus to the USB disk - Kaspersky Rescue Disk, created on the basis of Linux.
First, check the “Linux ISO/Other ISO Grub4dos compatible ISO” checkbox, and then select the Kaspersky Rescue Disk image on your computer.
The name of the image can be edited. Start copying the image to the USB drive.
Let's finish adding files to the disk; I think this is enough for the example. A multiboot flash drive with several Windows and utilities is ready for use.
Checking the bootable USB flash drive in WinSetupFromUSB
In the WinSetupFromUSB program you can check the bootable USB disk directly from the program window.
First, make sure that the application has correctly selected the USB flash drive if you have multiple USB drives connected to your computer.
Check the “Test in QEMU” box, and then click on the “GO” button.
After this, it will start virtual machine QEMU, which will display (or not, if the flash drive was created unsuccessfully) the boot process from the flash drive.
If the flash drive boots, the “GRUB4DOS” window will open. First you need to choose what exactly should be loaded on your computer.
In our case, by default, booting from Windows is selected first, then booting from the hard drive is selected, followed by Acronis True Image and Kaspersky Rescue Disk (in the order in which we recorded them on the flash drive).
Using the “” and “↓” keys on the keyboard, select the corresponding boot menu item, and then press the “Enter” button.
When you select “Windows NT6 (Vista/7 and above) Setup”, a window will open asking you to select Windows 7 or Windows 10 operating systems for installation.
After choosing to boot from Acronis True Image, a utility window will open for Reserve copy and recovery.
If you select Kaspersky Rescue Disk, the anti-virus disk window will open.
It won't hurt if you check the operation of the bootable flash drive directly on the computer.
Conclusions of the article
The WinSetupFromUSB program supports the creation of a multiboot flash drive with several operating systems and additional utilities. If necessary, the user can boot from a bootable USB flash drive for installation on a computer Windows operating systems or Linux, to carry out the necessary work on a PC using utilities recorded on a flash drive.
Experienced PC and Internet user
And others.
So far I have not been able to add an antivirus or to scan my computer for viruses. From this multiboot flash drive, you can install only one version of Windows 7 and Windows XP recorded on it. That is, I don’t yet know how to make sure that there are several images of Windows 7 on a flash drive so that we can choose during installation. (If you have several operating systems to install in your image, in this case there will be a choice. How to make one Windows image 7 Ultimate could be installed on Windows 7: Starter; Home; Professional or Maximum read and watch). I hope to sort this out in future articles. He covered all the nuances. Let's run to create a multiboot flash drive.
Article structure
1. Download and install MultiBoot USB
Let's download the MultiBoot USB program with which we will make a multiboot flash drive.
Download conveniently from torrent
http://rutracker.org/forum/viewtopic.php?t=3848726
After downloading, it is advisable to check the checksums
The checksums have agreed, we proceed to the installation.
Run as administrator
Click OK
The installed program starts immediately
Half the battle is done.
2. Download and install UltraISO
You don’t have to do this step if you already have a program installed for working with ISO images (for example). We need a program to mount images in virtual disk For Windows entries to a flash drive.
Download UltraISO from the official website and with the desired language
http://www.ezbsystems.com/ultraiso/download.htm
Launch the downloaded file. In the system warning window, click Launch
We are greeted by the UltraISO installation wizard. Click Next >
Click Install
Click Complete
UltraISO launches. Click Trial period...
UltraISO installed and running
3. Format and install the bootloader on the flash drive
Go down the page in the Download section and download the ISO image in the archive
Downloaded archive
Rename the image to memtest86_5_01.iso and copy it to a folder boot on a multiboot flash drive
Now let's fix the menu_u.lst file
To do this, copy the piece of code responsible for launching Elcomsoft System Recovery Pro v3.0
find -set-root /boot/Elcomsoft.ISO
map -mem /boot/Elcomsoft.ISO (hd32)
chainloader (hd32)
and insert below the item that launches the old test random access memory. In the picture below you can see what I came up with
Change the title and image names to memtest86_5_01.iso
We remove the piece of code that runs the old test. Press Ctrl+S and test what we got
Everything is working.
Conclusion
We have created a multiboot flash drive with which you can install , or . It also includes a bunch of useful programs that can be launched directly from a flash drive, two mini systems Windows 7 and Windows XP (you can boot into them and copy data from system disk before installing the system) and almost full-fledged Windows XP with a huge set of utilities for resuscitating the installed system and. All that remains is to learn how to use it all.
In the following articles about multiboot flash drives, we will try to do it with antiviruses. To be able to cure a system that does not boot.
In my previous article, I talked about how to burn various types of information onto CD/DVD discs, for example: music in MP3 format, any boot program (for example, installation Windows disk or antivirus), a movie in DVD format and, of course, just a set of any files and folders.
Fortunately, CDs and DVDs are becoming increasingly relegated to the background these days. Many laptops no longer have disk drives, and for stationary home computers there is often simply no point in buying a disk drive (if only for reading and writing Blu-ray discs).
And fortunately, because disks are being replaced by ordinary flash drives, i.e. flash drives. Progress does not stand still and now most music players, video players and TVs support the ability to play information directly from a flash drive! Moreover, you can make a flash drive bootable, and, for example, install Windows from it or run any computer maintenance program (antiviruses, partition managers, LiveCD and much more)!
In this article I will share with you in a simple way creating a bootable one using one simple program.
But how convenient is it now to use flash drives and not carry these discs with you in special boxes? :) I put a lot of any movies and music on one flash drive, after which you can listen to music in the car by inserting a flash drive, watch movies by simply connecting it to the TV or DVD. Also, at the same time, the flash drive can be bootable and simply store numerous of your documents and various kinds of files. In general, everything in one bottle :)
In the article about burning discs, I talked separately about recording music, movies, boot program images and mixed data. And for flash drives, such a manual is not required, because to record movies, music, or just a set of files, you just need to copy it all to a flash drive and that’s it! For convenience, you can also sort into different folders. That is, it is clear that a separate program for writing data to a flash drive is not required :)
For example, I copy music:
It's simple!
And now not only flash drives, but USB external ones are very relevant hard disks, which can contain a huge amount of information, for example 2 TB (2000 GB). And they are used in exactly the same way as flash drives: connect to USB, copy everything you need and you’re done! And no CDs needed.
But how can you make it so that you can write to a USB storage device (be it a flash drive or an external hard drive), for example Windows installer, and then insert the USB flash drive into the desired computer and install Windows on it directly from the flash drive? Or we want to write a bootable antivirus onto a flash drive to scan the computer before the system starts. And someone may need a boot program to reset Windows passwords. I wrote about this program in the article:
Or maybe someone would like to have several different boot programs on a flash drive with the ability to select through a special menu? It is very comfortable! But in this case, unfortunately, simply copying images of the necessary programs to a flash drive is not enough... You will need a separate program in order to make the flash drive bootable and fill it with the necessary boot programs. I've come across several programs that perform the same function. They are all free! I personally settled on one and haven’t even had to resort to the help of other programs yet.
The program is called "WinSetupFromUSB". She, like many others, is on English language, but don’t let this scare you, because you have this article at hand :)
Let's look at how to make a bootable USB flash drive using it.
Download and unpack the WinSetupFromUSB program.
First we need to download the program. As I have already mentioned in many of my articles, you need to download programs from official sites, and not from anywhere! Otherwise, you might end up downloading viruses for yourself in addition to the program :)
winsetupfromusb.com
This is the official website of the program. At the top of the window you will see links to download the latest Beta versions of the program, but I do not recommend downloading them, since such versions of the programs are at the testing stage and may have various glitches. It is better to always download the latest stable versions released so that there is no “beta” or “b” prefix.
As we can see in the example from the image above, the latest stable version today is 1.5. Here I am downloading it as an example in the form of an unpacked .exe archive. There is another option in the 7z archive, but there is no difference.
In the next window, simply click “Download” and the program will immediately begin downloading to your computer:
After downloading the program, run the downloaded file to unpack:
A window will appear in which you need to specify a folder on your computer to unpack the archive:
I unpack directly to my desktop. In this case, the program will still be unpacked into a separate folder “WinSetupFromUSB”, which will be created independently. To start unpacking you need to click “Extract”.
After unpacking we see a folder with the name of the program:
This is where the program itself will be located.
Now let's start creating a bootable USB flash drive...
We create a flash drive with any boot programs using WinSetupFromUSB!
So, we unpacked the program and now in the folder we see 2 files to choose from to run:
One is designed to run on 32-bit Windows systems, and the other (which is labeled “x64”) is designed to run on 64-bit systems. Run the appropriate file depending on the bitness of your Windows. At the same time, there will be no difference in the program itself and the speed of its operation! I recommend running the program as Administrator. To do this, right-click on the file and select “Run as administrator” (see image above).
The program will start and we will see this window:
The program is very easy to use!
First, you should know that the first time you write, the program will format the flash drive, which means deleting all existing data on it. Therefore, either use any empty flash drive for these purposes, or copy everything that is stored on the flash drive somewhere to your computer so as not to lose data!
After launching the program, connect the USB flash drive (or USB HDD), which you want to make bootable to your computer. This can be done before starting the program.
In the topmost section “USBdiskselectionandformattools”, the first thing you need to do is select the USB drive to which you will record. I currently have only one flash drive connected to my computer, so the program automatically indicated it:
If you have several devices connected, be sure to select the one you need in the top selection list (see image above). And, make no mistake, because the program, as mentioned above, will destroy all data! It will be best if you have only one connected to your computer USB drive, on which you are just going to record programs.
Below, check the “AutoformatitwithFBinst” checkbox to format the flash drive and make it bootable. Next, you need to select the file system into which the flash drive will be formatted (point 3 in the image above): FAT32 or NTFS. NTFS will be supported in most cases today, so it's best to choose it. However, FAT32 does not support recording files larger than 4GB, which may hinder you in the future.
Now go to the “AddtoUSBdisk” section:
In this section we will just add boot programs that will be written to the flash drive. We see the following options:
Windows 2000/XP/2003 Setup.
You should choose this if you are going to burn the installer of one of the listed Windows systems onto a USB disk. All of them have long been outdated and I think few people will need this item today.
Windows Vista / 7 / 8 / Server 2008 / 2012 / Based ISO.
This choice will allow you to write the installer to a USB disk for more than modern systems Windows, for example 7 or 8. This is already relevant today and I think it will be useful to many!
UBCD4Win / WinBuilder / Windows FLPC setup / Bart PE.
This item is needed if you want to burn a boot program created based on WinPE to a USB disk. But most boot software is based on Linux, so many will never need this feature, or very rarely.
Linux ISO / Other Grub4dos compatible ISO.
Current feature! Allows you to burn a Linux-based boot program to your USB drive. Nowadays, most programs are created this way. For example, bootable versions of antivirus products, boot version famous program for creating backup copies and recovery – Acronis, a program for resetting Windows user passwords.
SysLinuxbootsector / Linux Distribution using SysLinux / ISO Linux.
This item is likely to be of little use to anyone. The option allows you to write programs with the Syslinux bootloader to a USB drive. If the program image has a Syslinux folder, then most likely you will need to use this option to write it to USB.
So, now that you at least roughly know the purpose of each item in the program, you can start adding programs.
Let's say we want to put the Windows 8.1 installer, a program for creating backups and restoring them - Acronis, and a program for resetting the password onto a flash drive. Let this be an example.
So, check the box “WindowsVista / 7 / 8 / Server 2008 / 2012 / BasedISO” and click button to the right"...", intended for selecting an image with the desired Windows:
Click “OK” in the next window:
The standard one will open Windows Explorer, where you need to select ISO file(image) of the system you need and click “Open”. In my example, I select Windows 8.1:
Now I add Acronis program. I select the item “LinuxISO / OtherGrub4doscompatibleISO” and in the same way, by clicking “…”, I select the image of the bootable version of Acronis in the form of an ISO file:
After selecting the program image, you will be asked to specify the name of the menu item, by clicking on which you will open the added program:
You can mentally ask the question: “how did I know that the bootable version of Acronis is based on Linux, on the basis of which I chose the “LinuxISO / OtherGrub4doscompatibleISO” item?” In fact, in no way, purely intuitively and based on the fact that now most boot programs are built on similar Linux systems. However, you can try to find out this on the official websites of the programs themselves. But it’s even easier to take and write the program directly through the “LinuxISO / OtherGrub4doscompatibleISO” item and if it suddenly doesn’t work, then rewrite the flash drive again, choosing a different option :) Fortunately, all this doesn’t take long.
So, I prepared 2 programs for writing to a flash drive: Windows 8.1 and Acronis installer:
And here, since there is only one option for selecting each type of program to be recorded, another question arises: “How then can you add 2-3 or more boot programs of the same type (for example, Linux-based) or 2-3 Windows installation programs?”
The question is correct! The program allows you to record as many programs as you like onto a flash drive. Everything is limited only by its volume :) But this needs to be done in several approaches.
At the moment, I have already indicated 1 Acronis program based on Linux, and I need to write down another one - password reset, which is also built on Linux. So, you will have to add the password reset program to the flash drive on the second run.
But first, let's write down the 2 programs that I added. To do this, just click the “Go” button at the very bottom of the window:
The program will give 2 warnings that the data will be 100% deleted, the disk will be repartitioned and recovery will probably be impossible. I already warned you about deleting data before starting to work with the program, so I hope you understood all this and made a copy of the files located on your USB drive, if necessary :)
Click “Yes” in each warning window:
The recording process will begin specified programs to a flash drive. The recording duration depends on the amount of data and the speed of the flash drive. The recording process is shown at the bottom of the window:
For example, for this example I recorded Windows 8.1 3.85 GB in size and Acronis 355 MB in size onto an 8 GB USB 2.0 flash drive and it took me about 15 minutes. If the flash drive were USB 3.0, the process would most likely be reduced to 5 minutes or even less. Now flash drives and external USB Hard drives are mostly in USB 3.0 format, which gives very high information transfer speeds.
The end of recording will be indicated by a window with the inscription “Jobdone”, where you just need to click “OK”:
After the first 2 programs are written, we can run WinSetupFromUSB again and add more programs to the flash drive, and we no longer have to format it!
When you run WinSetupFromUSB a second time to add new programs, do not check the “AutoformatitwithFBinst” checkbox! All that remains is to select new programs and press the “Go” button again to record:
As a result, new programs will be added to the flash drive. If you need to add more, then do the 3rd launch of the program and again add what you need :)
That's actually the whole recording process. Now our USB drive is ready and all we have to do is boot from it!
To configure the computer to boot from a USB drive (it doesn’t matter whether it’s a flash drive or an external USB hard drive), most often you have to go into the BIOS and make some settings there. Explain important BIOS features, including boot order from various devices, I'm going to in a separate article:
Now I will briefly show how to do this using the example of one of the BIOS versions - AmiBios:
There are many versions of BIOS and each of them has a slightly different interface and capabilities, but the principle is still the same and each has a device priority menu similar to that described above.
After saving the settings, the computer will reboot and boot from the flash drive will begin, since it was set as the first boot device.
You will need to wait a few seconds and the boot menu will appear, where all the programs we recorded via “WinSetupFromUSB” will be listed:
By selecting the arrows on the keyboard (because the mouse works in such boot programs will not be) the desired program and pressing the “Enter” key, it will start running.
That's all!
I think that the article will be useful for those who want to have installation files on a flash drive Windows versions and various utilities for recovery, partitioning hard drive to partitions, password resets and various other purposes.
As you can see, such multiboot flash drives are very easy to write!
Have a nice day and good luck! Bye;)
Any user will not refuse to have a good multi-boot flash drive that could provide all the distribution kits he needs. Modern software allows you to store several images of operating systems and useful programs on one bootable USB drive.
To create a multiboot flash drive you will need:
- USB drive with a capacity of at least 8 Gb (preferably, but not required);
- a program that will create such a drive;
- operating system distribution images;
- a set of useful programs: antiviruses, diagnostic utilities, backup tools (also desirable, but not required).
ISO images of operating rooms Windows systems and Linux can be prepared and opened using the Alcohol 120%, UltraISO or . For information on how to create an ISO in Alcohol, read our tutorial.
Before you start working with the following software insert your USB drive into your computer.
Method 1: RMPrepUSB
To create a multiboot flash drive, you will need the Easy2Boot archive in addition. It contains the necessary file structure for recording.
You can check its functionality using the RMPrepUSB emulator. To launch it, press the key "F11".
Method 2: Bootice
This is a multifunctional utility whose main task is to create bootable flash drives.
You can download BOOTICE together with WinSetupFromUsb. Only in the main menu you will need to press the button "Bootice".
The usage of this utility is as follows:
That's all. Boot information for the Windows operating system is now recorded on the flash drive.
Method 3: WinSetupFromUsb
As we said above, this program has several built-in utilities that help you complete the task. But she can also do it herself, without aids. IN in this case do this:
Method 4: XBoot
This is one of the easiest to use utilities for creating bootable flash drives. For the utility to work correctly, you must have it installed on your computer.
