USB Thumb Drive Boot Selector

[jthunder]

Question related to dual booting and using a usb drive as the OS selector - I have not seen this covered in this forum yet.

 

I am aiming to use a bootable usb drive as the OS menu using GRUB.

I am aiming to partition my hard drive into two partitions (NTFS - Windows 2000 and HFS - OSX). The NTFS partition already exists and Windows 2000 is installed.

I would like to leave the first partition as active and if the usb drive is not booted from, Windows will boot by default.

 

With the usb drive connected, I would like the option to select with of the OS's to boot from using GRUB.

 

I was thinking this would be the process:

 

1. Boot from a linux livecd and partition the drive (create a primary partition of type af after the primary and active ntfs partition).

2. Boot from the OSX DVD and use disk utility to create the HFS partition and install to it.

3. Boot from a linux livecd and use parted to set the NTFS partition back to active.

4. Install and edit the GRUB menu on the USB drive to allow the selection of either of the partitions on the harddrive.

5. Ensure the bios is set to boot from the USB drive first, cd/dvd second and hard drive third.

 

Has anyone done this, or does this sound realistic before I spend time and screw up my laptop?

 

Thanks

 

JT

[gotoh]

if you're planning to get a USB boot loader pendrive, I would suggest you use something more powerful like XOSL 115 which alloaws you many specific settings...

[jthunder]

Thanks for the tip on XOSL gotoh, do you know if what I'm proposing will work?