YUMI - One ultimate USB Bootable Stick to rule them all!

Hey guys,

After solving some recent booting issues with Windows 10 i figured i'd pick up one of my old projects i had lying around.
My goal actually was to have a single 32GB Bootable USB Flashdrive with enough tools at my disposal so if i ever ran into any trouble (or went to help someone else), it was going to be all i needed!

Someone hinted me that YUMI was a great tool to create a bootable USB stick that could carry mutliple images so i got that and started experimenting with it.

The following images are the ones i would like to put on this USB stick:
- Windows 10 Pro x64 ISO (this way i have an installer and Recovery Environment at my disposal) -WIMBOOT
- Ultimate BootCD USB ISO (v538 was the latest i think)
- Macrium Reflect Rescue ISO 64-bit
- Minitool Partition Wizard ISO

Since the latter 3 are not supported by YUMI by default i had to guess and pick use: 'An Unlisted ISO'.
This gives the option for several bootloaders. In several YT tutorials i saw people select the default GRUB loader.
The 'Minitool Partition Wizard ISO' does not seem to want to work with that though.
Everything else seems to work fine (except for some exotic options the UBCD image holds...but thats fine).

Anyone else have experience with this and might know of a way to get that Minitool image to work? :)

The remaining space on my bootdrive is used for several Windows executables, installers etc.
But if anyone thinks i am missing a majorly useful ISO feel free to let me know! :)

You can try my Easy2Boot project instead of YUMI.
The supported ISOs are listed here List of tested ISOs\payloads (with instructions) :: Easy2Boot.
You just copy over the ISO files to the USB drive for most ISOs to work.
You can also add UEFI bootable image files which you can make from any ISO which supports UEFI booting and directly boot from WIM and VHD files just by copying them onto the USB drive (it uses NTFS).
You can also have many ISOs with persistence and much more and E2B is highly configurable.

I'm not sure if YUMI is being supported any more. I used to use it a lot.
Now I find that RUFUS is (for me) a more comfortable free alternative: Rufus

Can you boot multiple isos from one usb stick using rufus?

I don't believe you can.
EDIT: after a bit of thought, I suppose you could do it by installing GRUB on the drive and then adding things - but that's a lot more complicated than most would care for. But at that point you're probably out of RUFUS and into custom editing of the GRUB menu (not hard, but definitely not as easy as YUMI)

I find that my only need for a multiple boot drive like that would be in a commercial setting - and then it's just easier to have different flash drives for each program. Plus, the licensing issues for commercial use are a real detractor.

If using it for personal use, it's just much easier to make a new copy for each program you want to run/boot.
Then, you'll have the latest version, the boot loader won't interfere with the boot loader for the program, and you won't have to worry if there are any other issues (I had huge problems with booting the Ultimate Bood CD using YUMI).

Somewhere in my junk, I still have a copy of a YUMI drive that I made years ago. It never was updated and I never needed it.
I do keep copies of Windows Installers on separate flash drives (because of the size they take a long time to make) - but that was because I needed them at work. I don't have a copy of 1903 - but the recovery tools on the earlier versions work quite well. I figure if I do need 1903, I'll just have to take the time to make a new on on one of my older copies.

In short, I feel it's better (as a personal user, not as a technician) to make a new drive when you need it. That way you have the latest version and it should have fewer issues than older versions do. Also, since you can get flash drives cheaply (8 gB drives sell for only a few dollars online) it's easy to have several on hand with the different programs on each

To create multi-boot UFDs I use WinSetupFromUSB, Downloads | WinSetupFromUSB. It works well.

I used AIOBoot to create my multi-boot multi-tool usbfd

Thanks!

Hi folks

@SIW2 --regarding dual boot .

For me the easiest by far was to take an old SSD (still got a working 128GB one) with a sata->USB3 connection where I installed a working Linux distro together with VMWare running W10 Pro as a VM on it and as a dual boot KYHI's recovery disk if I need it. (You could make a VM of the KYHI disk but if you need this recovery tool you probably want to play with REAL / PHYSICAL hardware).

This IMO is better than any of these other tools etc as you have a full working windows system with any programs you want to install such as Macrium, partition magic etc etc etc . You also on the linux system get a nice load of tools like DD and GRSYNC for file and partition manipulation where you need that sort of "repair" too. I can also boot KYHI's rescue disc if required via dual boot -- computer at bios boot shows 2 EFI partitions for the SSD - the Linux one and the "Rescue" (KYHI's disk) so easy to boot and it works on diffrent machines without any problems --the Linux live system has good hardware detection at boot in any case.

With SSD and sata-->USB3 adapter the speed is so much better than any usb stick --including the response time of the VM !!! which also has Office 2019 on it too.

To get the dual boot to work on the SSD simply for KYHI's disk create a bootable DD (not iso) format with rufus on to a usb stick and then DD that over to the SSD. Note the SSD needs for Linux a /boot/efi partition for EFI booting.

Cheers
jimbo