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How can I create a multi bootable (with menu) cd/dvd that contains a number of live cds? Is there any "easy" way of doing this? Isolinux is the way to go I guess, but is there any tool available for this?

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This is an excellent idea! –  eleven81 Mar 4 '10 at 17:51
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The guys from HAK5 (video podcast now on revision3), did an episode about what you're asking.

USB Multipass Tuesday, July 28th, 2009 – running time 35:17




Here is their tutorial:

It has been the dream of many to combine the pen-testing, forensics and recovery power of our favorite USB bootable Linux distros into one drive complete with customized boot menu. Finally Frank Castle shares this digital mojo with us. I bring you the USB Muiltipass. While the video walks you through the step by step I'll provide an overview with links here.






For most of the distros I added, I started off with an .iso version of it. I then extracted the .isos either to my desktop or directly to the root of the thumb drive (or you could just copy the files from a burnt version of the distro, just as long as you get the files to the root of your thumb drive). Most Linux distros come with 2 folders: a boot folder and another folder that actually holds the meat and potatoes of the distro. Since it would be impossible to have 6 or 7 different boot folders that don't overlap on the same thumb drive (without multiple partitions - a route I tried to take for way too long) I simply renamed the boot folder to something like bootbt3 or bootknop depending on the distro, and just left the other folder as is. I then added the appropriate information by using the information by either:

  1. Looking at the information provided in the syslinux or isolinux file in most Linux distros

  2. Looking at a (now taken down) web page with tons of examples (appropriately added to this tutorial under Examples.txt)

  3. Trial and Error




    OPHcrack (the latest version - 2.3.0), a tool I have known, loved, and depended on (at least until I met Kon-boot; thank you) was a apparently different than any of the other distros because just copying the files from the .iso blah blah blah didn't work. It turns out that you have to burn the Distro to a spare thumb drive using tazusb (Slitaz installer) from http://www.objectif-securite.ch/slitaz/tazusb.exe. You then copy these files to the root of your thumb drive and so on and so on. The second challenge was to get both versions of OPHcrack (XP and Vista) on the drive, since ALL of the files overlapped. It turns out that the only difference in the two versions were the tables provided so I just copied the tables from one CD to the other and proceeded forward as usual.


When it comes to customizing Grub its simply a matter of creating a 640x480 - 14 color splash screen image. This is easy to accomplish with the Gimp. Once you've created a 640x480 image you can crunch the colors be selecting Image, Mode, Indexed and entering 14 ad the maximum colors. Save this file as a XMP, then gzip it. Copy the gz to the root of your USB drive and prepend splashimage /image.xpm.gz to your menu.lst file. Further information on customizing the grub menu.lst file for your specific distros can be found in the Grub manual. As an example I'll provide my config here:

splashimage /jozette.xpm.gz
color blue/black yellow/blue
timeout 120
title BackTrack 4 BETA
root (hd0,0)
title Kon-Boot-test
map --hook
chainloader (fd0)+1
map (hd1) (hd0)
map --hook
rootnoverify (fd0)
title Memtest86
kernel /memdisk
initrd /memtestp.img
title ntpasswd
initrd /ntpasswd/initrd.cgz
title DBAN
kernel /memdisk
initrd /dban.img
title SystemRescueCD
initrd /initram.igz
title FreeDOS
root (hd0,2)
kernel /memdisk
initrd /freedos.img floppy
title Ophcrack
initrd /bootoph/rootfs.gz


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