New Mulit-Boot Loader for USB Drives 1
The folks over at PenDriveLinux have been busy. They have a new version of their multi-boot creation tool for flash drives, YUMI (Your Universal Multiboot Installer). YUMI-0.0.1.7.exe is the current released version, replacing MultibootISO.
The MultibootISO tool never worked for me. I was using unetbootin to load a single ISO onto a single flash drive, but often I’ve needed gparted, then DBAN, then PARTIMG, then an full Linux like Ubuntu 10.04 or Puppy or TinyCore. With YUMI, you can have all of those on a single flash drive and select which to use at boot time. It seems to work fine.
They finally added an Unknown ISO option so ANY ISO you have with a distro can be added to the boot menus. The boot-up screens are automatically organized nicely by type of tool.
I just placed about 5 ISO files onto a single 2GB flash drive. As I write this, Android-x86 is booting on a netbook. SWEET! I can’t wait to try it out for an hour or so before trying out the new MeeGo x86 release. As long-time readers know, I run Maemo today, so MeeGo would be the next update for that device.
Well, I’ve attempted to boot 3 different OSes.
- MeeGo failed almost immediately.
- Lubuntu displayed the boot screen, asked for a language and eventually failed.
- Android x86 was left to boot for over 30 minutes – the ……………. just kept coming.
The gparted ISO that I specified didn’t show up in the boot menu – I used a different ISO at the 3rd decimal point – mine was newer. I probably should have put it into the Unknown ISO group.
Some Good News
SpinRite did work perfectly. It is running now across all the partitions to refresh any lazy bits.
I moved the gparted ISO into the Unknown ISO group. Hopefully, it will work better there.
Spinrite has been running overnight in mode-4 (flip all bits) and has found some bad sectors. I don’t have any idea how much longer it will need to complete, but it has been over 16 hours already. Dynastat-mode is slow. I believe it is working on the last partition, 1:7, now, but I really don’t recall how many partitions were on the disk. It is only a 160GB HDD in the netbook. Yesterday, no sectors were relocated according to the SMART data on the disk. None of the other partitions already handled showed any problems. That’s good news.
Looks like running spinrite was needed on this system. At the end of the run, I’ll consider whether a replacement HDD is needed. For this size, those should be pretty cheap, about $40, tops.