Creating a multiboot USB flash drive using GRUB

So I am currently booting my system from a USB flash drive, and probably will be for quite some time. One thing that annoyed me about syslinux is that it's really nothing more than a very simple boot loader, but sometimes you want more.

I've always used GRUB. GRUB has support for splash images so it looks nice. I also think the editing features of GRUB are great. Mistyped the kernel name after updating? Edit it in the menu. I also really like GRUB's default feature, which allows for some nice tricks, but that's for another post.

All in all, I wanted to get booting using GRUB. I've always installed GRUB 'by hand'. I've noticed the existance of grub-install, but the first time I ever read about it, I read about some issue with it. It was probably not important, but since I knew GRUB's setup commands by hand I didn't need it anyway. Turns out that if you run linux, GRUB will just map your USB flash drive as another harddrive (or at least it did for me with two different drives).

To install GRUB, it expects some files to be present. It also expects a filesystem to be present too if you install the same way I do. Because I like my USB flash drives easily accessible on multiple platforms, I format them as FAT32. I must say I only used them in linux so far, so if you're just like me you might as well format them ext2. In typable commands:

# mkdosfs -F 32 -n [somename] /dev/sdxy

Or:

# mke2fs -L [somename] /dev/sdxy

Of course sdxy refers to the partition on the flash drive you want to use, in my case it's /dev/sde1. You don't have to use labels (-n and -L options respectively), but I prefer to label my filesystems.

I also prefer to have my filesystems clean, so I try to keep all this bootable stuff contained in a folder. Mount your flash drive, and create a folder boot:

# mount /dev/sdxy /mnt
# mkdir /mnt/boot

I will be using the folder boot to store my kernels, initramfs's and the GRUB folder with GRUB files. GRUB needs just three (3) files to get installed: stage1, stage2 and the appropiate stage1_5. Easiest way to get these is from an existing install, if that's not possible for you, ask google for another solution (i.e.: "compile grub"). When using a FAT32 formatted flash drive you need to copy fat_stage1_5, when using ext2 or ext3 you should use e2fs_stage1_5.

# mkdir /mnt/boot/grub
# cp /boot/grub/stage{1,2} /mnt/boot/grub
# cp /boot/grub/fat_stage1_5 /mnt/boot/grub

GRUB now has all the files it needs, so let's install it:

# grub
grub> device (hd7) /dev/sdx

grub> root (hd7,z)
 Filesystem type is fat, partition type 0xb

grub> setup (hd7)
 Checking if "/boot/grub/stage1" exists... yes
 Checking if "/boot/grub/stage2" exists... yes
 Checking if "/boot/grub/fat_stage1_5" exists... yes
 Running "embed /boot/grub/fat_stage1_5 (hd7)"...  16 sectors are embedded.
succeeded
 Running "install /boot/grub/stage1 (hd7) (hd7)1+16 p (hd7,0)/boot/grub/stage2
/boot/grub/menu.lst"... succeeded
Done.

grub> quit

this maps (hd7) to /dev/sdx, the root line needs to be changed to match z = y - 1, in other words if you're using partition 1, enter a 0 for z, increment both equally for other partitions. You should now be able to boot from the USB flash drive, but we're not done yet. I like to have a config too, and I included a nice menu background, so I copied splash.xpm.gz over to /mnt/boot/grub. As for the config, here's mine for a gentoo 2008.0 minimal livecd squashfs image on my flash drive:

default 0
timeout 30
splashimage=/boot/grub/splash.xpm.gz

title Gentoo Minimal LiveCD 2008.0
kernel /boot/kernel-2008.0.img root=/dev/ram0 init=/linuxrc dokeymap looptype=squashfs loop=/minimal-2008.0.squashfs cdroot vga=791
initrd /boot/initrd-2008.0.igz

Name the file menu.lst and GRUB should be able to find it. If you now boot from the flash drive, you should see the menu. And as another bonus, booting entries seems to be way faster than it is with syslinux!