How to Create And Clone a MULTIBOOT USB using YUMI

This tutorial will explain how to create a MULTIBOOT USB drive using YUMI (Your Universal Multiboot Installer) and install Linux distributions of your choice to your USB flash drive.

Once you have finished creating your multiboot drive I will show you how to clone your USB to give an exact copy of an already setup multiboot drive to a friend.

For extra verification I download Beyond Compare to verify the two flash drives are an exact replica.

NOTES:

-Again please be sure when you're formatting drives that you select the right drive letter, I take NO responsibility for anything that happens due to the end user selecting the wrong drive letter.

-The syslinux command I typed was:

-The 64-bit command would be:

Replace the "#" with your drive letter.

[troyf]

Disregard - I tried to create the multiboot usb before the iso was downloaded completely! I'm writing you this reply from within SLAX booted off my new multiboot usb drive! Thanks for the great tut...

[obsidianjaguar]

tried this today and all good. The reason I thought about this approach was because you can get the same end result with far fewer utlities to Download .. less setps, and time .. for the average user less is more ..

[obsidianjaguar]

The one thing I did want to mention, which is probably beyond the scope of your post, is that after your done with your YUMI installs, you could go for portable apps ontop of YUMI .. This would allow you to access some usefull ultites within the OS ... AND has the side effect of automatily giving you the drive icon :)

[obsidianjaguar]

thanks for this, I was wondering how to clone ... you gave me an idea ... Just run YUMI withon distro, then copy all from USB a to B and should be good to go?

[James-febg]

How large should the clone ghost file be?  With the same 2 distributions you used (XPud & DSL) Win 7 and Win XP I got 6.6 GB

[obsidianjaguar]

what I was asking about would be .. 1stly making a YUMI usb ( A) with all your distros, tweak until your happy then BlankUSB drive ( B) gets just one ISO through YUMI .. that would get bootloader on it.. Then just copy A over to B for a quck clone using just YUMI, rather than manually matching and installing boot-loader ... also it seems like yumi can format drives just fine as long as the os sees it ... for some reason my 64g usb has to be manually selected in yumi, not automatically detected

[James-febg]

I went ahead and formatted the 1 TB ext HDD  fat32 and set allocation table to 4096.  In disk manager on bottom win 7 32 bit it shows full size but at the top and in yumi setup it shows it as 417 GB.  Should I continue and later partition the disk to 2 partitions, reformatting the 2 partition to NTFS, hoping I get my space back?

[obsidianjaguar]

you could also think about skiping RMprep for previously mentioned reasons .
Personally I find that QMENU on its own is great for testing, but if people are after a " one click to test " that functionality exisits in "xboot" , and for some distros the ablity to add BOOT4DOS, rather than syslinux works better, and you no longer have that 4G file size limit ... Having siad that, by far there are more ISO's that play nice with SYSLINUX than not, ,, so for 99% of the time Syslinux .

[StormRageTV]

When i try to install syslinux bootloader i see this error message "invalid media signature (not an FAT/NTFS volume?)" any ideas?

Writing MBR: Access is denied.
Did not successfully update the MBR; continuing...

[James-febg]

if I want to format the 1 tera ext HD with guiformat what size should I set the allocation unit.  It defaults to 32768

[James-febg]

when I try to use the clone ghost tells me there is not enough room on target.  I tried with the original usb partition that was cloned and another usb disk that has plenty of space.  Any suggestions

[steve]

RMPrepUSB will install syslinux 4.06 for you. Just click the Install Syslinux button and enter \multiboot for the path.

[James-febg]

I have a gho  file of my original yumi drive but have been unable to succeed.  when I try I get the message that the target is too small but it actually should have plenty of room.  I want to use the isos and programs I put on it.  Can I just copy that info from ghost image explorer?

[obsidianjaguar]

YUMI, will format fat 32 with default allocation unit size, be aware that selecting other allocation unit sizes through use of ultities such as windows format, or GUIformatter can confuse YUMI. in THEROY bigger allocation units wil resilut in fast drive performace, practise I find YUMI gets confused, when the drive geometry is not what YUMI expects .. therfore starting with a FAT32 or NTFS format on your drive and selecting the format option built into YUMI seems most likley to work with YUMI

[troyf]

YUMI can't extract the iso downloaded from within the YUMI application. The iso downloads in parts...