Easy2boot is a utility that allows you to flash a USB with multiple bootable images. This gives you the option of always carrying a variety of OSes / tools for all sorts of different scenarios (debugging using a Rescue image / gparted live, install Ubuntu / Windows 10 etc. images)

Here are the contents of a E2B USB stick that I tend to carry with me and use on a regular basis.

berger on draken in /me/berger/EASY2BOOT
at [14:00:22] ➜ tree \_ISO/LINUX/
\_ISO/LINUX/
├── android-x86_64-7.1-rc2.isodefault
├── archlinux-2017.12.01-x86_64.isodefault
├── gparted-live-1.1.0-1-amd64.isodefault
├── kali-linux-light-2018.4-amd64.isodefault
├── krd.isodefault
├── lxle_16.04.3_64.isodefault
├── TinyCore-current.isodefault
├── ubuntu-18.04.1.0-live-server-amd64.isodefault
└── ubuntu-18.04.1-desktop-amd64.isodefault

Setting up - Adding a Linux ISO

  • Download from here: https://www.fosshub.com/Easy2Boot.html
  • Extract the Easy2Boot Linux archive - run the docs/linux_utils/fmt.sh script to format the USB device
    • Make sure you select the right drive. Bash script doesn’t look very well written and by default it picked my internal drive!
  • Copy your .iso files to MAINMENU or LINUX
  • Rename the .iso to .isodefault
  • Defrag the USB device:
sudo perl /media/berger/EASY2BOOT/\_ISO/docs/linux_utils/defragfs /media/berger/EASY2BOOT/ -f

Articles/Tutorials

Notes

Try to use the same scripts for formatting / defragging that you used during the initial USB flashing. There are compabilitity issues between the different versions of the tool. If you don’t have the original downloaded zip / contents anymore, it might be worth it reflashing the USB and copying over the images to the newly created partition instead.