How can use an external HD as a OS install disk?

[Madhattan]

I have an external HD that I would like to partition into several volumes, each of which acts as a boot CD for several operating systems and live CDs.

I have tried making 5GB partitions and copying the data from my ISOs onto them, but I get BOOTMGR issues.

Ideally, the HD would house XP, 7 32, 7 64, snow leopard, and some linux live cds.

Has anyone else ever made one of these?

Is this something that I can easily do with Gparted?

Thank You

 

[Fayd]

Windows doesnt play nice being installed on a USB harddrive.

if you're installing it on an E-SATA drive, then it shouldn't be any different than an internal disk, though.

 

[Madhattan]

Hey Fayd,

thanks for the reply.
I think there seems to be some confusion.

I don't want to install windows on the drive, I want to use the HD to install windows and other things on other machines.

 

[mfenn]

The issue is that the BIOS is going to look at the first 512-byte sector (LBA 0) for a bootloader. For a CDROM or USB device, this isn't a problem since there is one LBA 0 for each device. For you, this is a problem, because your HDD only has one LBA 0, and the bootloader for each piece of installation media is going to want to reside there.

I doubt any of the tools that you're using to make bootable Windows installation media support writing the bootloader code to anywhere other than LBA 0. You're probably going to have to engage in some GRUB chainloading trickery to get around that.

In principle, the following procedure would work:
1. Create a bootable USB device for Windows
2. Boot into Linux
3. dd the contents of the USB block device to a partition that you've set up
4. Point in the GRUB config, make an entry to chainload onto that partition

Honestly though, you're better off just grabbing a bunch of 2-4GB USB thumbdrives and using those.

 

[mpilchfamily]

I agree. A few thumb drivers are a much better solution and take up less space.