UNetbootin

Want to add another OS to boot menu

Asked by corax57

Greetings,
   I used unetbootin to install Ubuntu on my XP installation. I worked great. I now have a dual boot computer. What I wanted to do next I just can't figure out. I want to also have a USB linux option. I have properly installed PCLinusOS on a USB so that it is now bootable. The problem is how to make it show up on the GRUB boot menu. I tried running unetbootin again and it says that it is already installed. I'm afraid if I uninstall it, it will screw up the current Ubuntu/XP configuation that is working great.

My BIOS doesn't support booting from the USB which would have been the ideal solution. Since that isn't an option I don't know what to do next. I just want the Ubuntu/XP to stay the same but have the Linux on the flash drive also show up on the GRUB menu so I can use it also if I want to. The main reason for this is so I can try out various Linux distro's on my flash drive to see if I like them or not.

I hope I've described the problem well enough. Please help. I greatly appreciate it.

Thank you.

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pe3k (qyx) said : 		#1

Hi,
so you have bootable linux on USB, but you cannot boot from it directly? Is this your problem? And you want to have new option in your boot menu, like "Boot from USB" to boot any system preinstalled on USB drive?

If your system cannot boot directly from USB, you will probably need some special boot manager, that can act as a USB driver, maybe even grub can do that job, check this post:
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/BootFromUSB
Read mainly section "Booting via grub". It this is your case, than solution is easy, add lines to menu.lst:
# to boot from a USB device
title Boot USB drive
root (hd1,0) #here change proper drive
chainloader +1
boot

It you have really old bios, than you can try different boot loader, e.g. PLoP, that should emulate USB driver, even if your BIOS cannot do it. Home page with install instructions is here:
http://www.plop.at/en/home.html

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