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+---
+title: Multi Distro Linux USB
+date: 2024-09-02
+draft: false
+---
+
+I often found myself needing to create a bootable USB stick with some Linux distro,
+either to install and try it, or to use it live for specific purpose,
+like using [Tails][1] Linux to generate/restore a PGP key and install it on the smart card,
+or using [ParrotSec][2] for testing or [HTB][3] challenges.
+
+I know it was possible to create a hard drive with multiple OS in different partitions, so
+I thought, it has to be possible to do the same thing using a USB drive.
+
+
+# How to create multi-distro bootable Linux stick
+Unless you are into [GRUB][8], and want to learn more about it and feel more comfortable fixing GRUB issues by yourself.
+
+## Don't.
+After spending days, looking into the grub configurations for running Rocky Linux and Proxmox (to no avail).
+I'm going to save you some deep rabbit hole dive.
+
+**Short answer**, if you will only work with images less than 4GB, then it *can* work, but
+if you are going to work with bigger images that you need live (Parrot Security 6+GB) it won't work.
+
+**Long answer**, I didn't find a lot of info online on how to create a multi-partition multi-boot USB stick,
+with the `efi` "boot" partition formatted as `fat32` and the "data/iso" partition formatted to anything else.
+
+Tools like [glim][5] (which is amazing btw), and [uGRUB][6] only work with a single `fat32` partition.
+
+Tutorials like [this][4] (which is amazing btw and mentioning how to work with multi-partition USB sticks,
+including with `ext4`), works too. **But never stable enough**.
+
+I have seen the same setup randomly failing while being used in live mode. I have seen the same image work on
+**only** one of my machines (the old one that have HDD) and fails on the others machines.
+
+To quote the documentation:
+> If you have any problem to boot, for instance stuck at the GRUB prompt before the menu,
+> try re-installing. If you have other exotic GRUB errors,
+> such as garbage text read instead of the configuration directives, try re-formatting your USB memory from scratch.
+> I've seen weird things happen...
+
+[Glim][7]
+
+## Why?
+At this point, I can't tell you why an image would work or not. I can't tell you how to boot Rocky Linux, or what is
+the required parameters to run proxmox linux.
+
+All I can tell you, is that it took me way too long to figure out, that it's not stable enough to run reliably.
+There might be a reason why it fails on the machine with the SSD, and why it couldn't insert `thinkpad_acpi' module,
+but for the original purpose of having a convinient way of setting up linux and updating images,
+I will stick with having to run
+```bash
+$ diskutil list
+$ diskutil eraseDisk JHFS+ Untitled /dev/diskX
+$ diskutil unmountDisk /dev/diskX
+$ sudo dd bs=4M if=path/to/image.iso of=/dev/diskX status=progress oflag=sync
+```
+and waiting for few minutes, for now.
+
+[1]: https://tails.net/
+[2]: https://parrotsec.org/
+[3]: https://www.hackthebox.com/
+[4]: https://linuxconfig.org/how-to-create-multiboot-usb-with-linux
+[5]: https://github.com/thias/glim
+[6]: https://github.com/adi1090x/uGRUB/
+[7]: https://github.com/thias/glim?tab=readme-ov-file#troubleshooting
+[8]: https://www.gnu.org/software/grub/