Multi-boot Flash drive

[WyomingKnott]

I've got a handful of bootable CDs - Win7 recovery, partition editors, Parted Magic, other utilities. Can anyone point me to a tutorial / software to make a bootable flash drive that can hold all of these and select which one to boot from a boot menu?

If I need a partition for each utility, I'm going to end up with more than four partitions, so that leads to an interesting question on initializing a flash drive as GPT! can that be done?

Thanks

Edit: I've found a couple of solutions (SARDU, YUMI) that will store .iso images and let you select one to boot from. Will this slow things down as the files are extracted from the image, or give me as good a speed as the USB device itself will allow?

 

[Ubrales]

Wyoming you know very well that iso images will be slower than just the USB drive. Wish you luck in finding an ideal solution, and when you do find it, please post a guide here.

USB speeds: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_ATA

It may well be that the iso speed is fast enough to catch up with the slow USB speeds.

 

[WyomingKnott]

Ubrales

I've been playing with YUMI, and it seems to boot faster than off a CD. I've got to find the patience to do some time trials. Some specific ISOs are known to YUMI and it installs them to the thumb drive unpacked, but most are just booted from the ISO using Grub.

Edit: What would be intensely great is if I could run all the compatible distro tools at once. That is, instead of booting to one of three Windows 7 PE tools, I could boot into Windows 7 PE and run any and all of those tools. Ditto for, say, Debian-based tools. Fewer reboots, more tools available.


"You may say that I'm a dreamer, but I'm not the only one"
(John Lennon, 'Imagine')

 

[Ubrales]

As soon as the UPS guy delivers today, I am going to swap out my boot drive (Seagate 13.7 ms access time) with a WD RE4 drive with better access times and 64 MB cache. I know it will boot faster but not sure how much faster. An SSD is down the road, not now.

I will also take a look at Seagate's hybrid drives.