Software > Computer programming

Help, trying to create a custom boot usb

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modobo:
Hi folks,

I got a mega problem here and it cannot be classified as DOS or a flavour of windows.  I designed my computer so that each drive has their own os system ie one drive has win 7,8 and 10, another drive has win 8 etc. There is no xp or OSx.  This way I can remove any drive without affecting the boot up procedure.

I have been using the uEFI bios boot manager to chose the drive that I want and it was working ok until I introduced win 10 to one of the drives with 7 and 8. So what happens now is win 10 just wont play ball even if set as the default OS. If I last logged out of win 10 then the next time I put on the pc and select that particular drive, I would not get a windows boot menu, it will simply go straight to win 10. Though it goes to my account and I log in, the desktop would not be my desk top or where I left off. I have to reboot and go through the bios boot manager again chose drive and sometimes I have to repeat this 4 times before I get a windows boot manager for that particular drive. Only after going through the windows boot manager and choosing win 10 would I see my own desktop.  There is only one account on that win 10, no other. If anyone knows what is causing this, I will be grateful for an explanation.

Anyway I don't want to bore you will all the other issues Im facing on my setup but I feel that if I can make a usb boot drive then the boot up menu for all the partitions can be programmed onto it.  The problem I am facing is that if it were dos, I could have used something like EasyBCD but that wont work on current windows os. All the examples of multiboot stuff on google and youtube are for those trying to install an os.  Nobody is designing a bootable usb for choosing which os u want to log into.

I'd be grateful if anyone can help me look into this or make a suggestion on how I can go about it. I remember something called clover back in the days which was a sort of independent boot up software that gave the freedom of multibooting
 Apple and Windows but that was not for usb but something similar will be great.  It can be any uefi compatible platform that can run when I switch the pc on to provide me with a boot menu.  Thanks in advance for any help.

DaveLembke:
I'd add a removable drive bay to the computer and have a drive for each OS and keep it all separate. This will make life much easier if you nuke and install on an OS to which you just install clean to that drive and all is well, and you dont have to work about the other OS's getting messed up.

I bought a bunch of 160GB SATA Hard Drives from Newegg for $9.99 per hard drive and have a system with removable hard drive bay and drives labelled with whatever OS I want to run.

As far as UEFI I set my bios to legacy mode with UEFI basically disabled. There is no benefit to UEFI in my system so I shut it off. This way older OS's dont have boot issues.

modobo:
Thanks Dave, It would be quite a bother to use a bay in my setup but one interesting point u made is running stuff in legacy mode. Im not sure my mobo supports legacy mode nor do I know if Win 7/8/10 supports this mode either. Will legacy mode support Dos and linux based utilities?

Thanks.

Geek-9pm:
I use legacy mode and can boot.
 Windows XP pro
 Windows 7 64 bit
 Windows 10 pro

Also, I boot Linux from CD if and when I reedit.

Macrium Reflect does a good job of fix up of the Windows 10 boot manager when it goes bad.
https://www.macrium.com/reflectfree
I boot it from a CD and repair the boot thing.

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