Boot and installing multiply OS's from ExtHDD?

Hello guys,

Always was a reader here, but now I have a question.
I have a external hard drive made from a spare laptop hard drive. Size is 160GB, enclosure is a Sharkoon Quickstore Portable Pro (USB 3.0).

I wanted to make 2 partitions on this disk. The first partition will be around 50GB and will contain the data for booting and installing different OS's.

The second partition (100GB) will be used a data storage, in short: just a external hard drive for storing files like music, pictures, etc. ...

I wanted to make the first partition bootable, and program a menu to choose between different OS's. Main concept is I want a hard drive with Windows 7, Windows XP, Ubuntu, etc. on it to INSTALL this to the PC it's plugged in. I already have a bootable USB stick containing Windows 7, that's where the idea came from. So I don't want to run a OS on the drive, but I want to be able to INSTALL a OS from the drive.
Already came op with the following:


But obviously it didn't work . Does anybody know what I'm up to, and can help me?

Hello mate, have a good look through the information contained in this tutorial linked below.

Install Windows 7 from USB Pen Drive/External Hard Disk Using Grub4Dos

Will take a look when I'm back from holiday. I noticed there where some mistakes in my batch file (never ever programmed DOS before so...). This should work:


I made the whole disk as one partition and made it bootable with the HP Format Utility. It can boot now, but then I get a command prompt waiting for input. Now I manually have to tick in the name of the batch file (start.bat) and then it goes off how I want it. But I will look at your link as soon as possible! Thanks in advance.

EDIT:
Tested it and doesn't work (my method). It does just nothing at the choice menu.
Looked at your link, and with searching after MultiBootISO I found the following: http://www.pendrivelinux.com/yumi-mu...t-usb-creator/
Wich looks pretty much what I needed: "Run the tool again to Add More ISOs/Distributions to your Drive.".

If it succeeded in what I want then I'll report back.

It can definitely be used to boot separate OSs from the same HDD/USB.

Be sure to post back here with updates.

Oke, I'm back. Tested the program out (YUMI) and must say it works how I wanted it to be :) . Now testing a other program (SARDU) which would do the same except support Windows ISO's better. Because at YUMI you manually have to adjust a map name whenever you try and boot a Windows based ISO. When you want to boot a Linux based ISO you have to adjust it back. A bit annoying I think so now going to test SARDU.

EDIT:

Tried it and reverted back to YUMI. Writing batch script for renaming the folders so it is a bit more easy *** and off we go. Doing it's job as it was meant. Thanks for the help anyways Bare Foot Kid.

****:

@echo off
cls
IF EXIST %~d0\sources\nul GOTO x1
IF EXIST %~d0\sources_windows\nul GOTO x2
:x1
rename %~d0\sources\ sources_windows
GOTO einde
:x2
rename %~d0\sources_windows sources
GOTO einde
:einde
exit