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Is there any reason why it might be a bad idea to take programs that are typically installed as bootable USB drives and instead create an appropriately sized partition for each of them on the internal drive? The obvious upside is that they would always be present, no hassle of keeping track of thumbdrives; it's basically just multibooting at this point. These programs also don't tend to take up very much storage space, so I don't imagine that it would be a significant loss of space on the internal drive.

Are there any obvious downsides that I haven't considered? (Besides the worst-case "internal drive corruption" situation, for which I would want to make a separate rescue disk regardless)

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    Actually GParted is not in the same category as Memtest86+; The only versions of GParted that I have usedwere a Linux application that requires a running Linux OS with GUI. The only versions of Memtest86+ I have used were standalone programs that ran from a boot menu, and required no OS nor kernel.
    – sawdust
    Commented Sep 29, 2023 at 23:29
  • @sawdust That is how GParted works as well. https://gparted.org/index.php: "GParted can be used on x86 and x86-64 based computers running Linux, Windows, or Mac OS X by booting from media containing GParted Live."
    – ETL
    Commented Sep 30, 2023 at 5:52
  • It would seem more convenient to leave them as ISOs, create one partition for all ISOs, and extract Easy2Boot onto it and configure accordingly (many LiveBoot ISOs use squashfs as the filesystem)
    – JW0914
    Commented Sep 30, 2023 at 13:22
  • @JW0914 I was recently thinking of doing something like that, but probably just using Ventoy directly (rather than a closed-source, and outdated-looking, program that uses Ventoy under the hood anyway). The Core question that I was intending to ask here was whether there's any significant downsides to doing this on the internal drive as opposed to on a flash drive. Given that every response I've received has been nitpicking details of what multiboot system is the best, I am assuming that there are not any major downsides to doing this on the internal drive. Do you agree with that assessment?
    – ETL
    Commented Sep 30, 2023 at 17:13
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    @ETL Provided the partitions are formatted the same as they would be when writing an ISO to a USB, that part should work without issue. The most secure way of doing this is to boot the ISO itself because LiveBoot ISOs can't be written to - this would allow you to store however many bootable ISOs you want on a partition, create a GRUB custom menu for them, and use the BIOS/UEFI boot menu to boot to a GRUB menu for choosing them.
    – JW0914
    Commented Oct 1, 2023 at 11:17

2 Answers 2

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Actually GParted is not in the same category as Memtest86+. The only versions of GParted that I have used were a Linux application that requires a running Linux OS with GUI. The only versions of Memtest86+ I have used were standalone programs that ran from a boot menu, and required no OS or kernel.

GParted is an application program that requires an OS. It is not a standalone program. GParted Live is simply the GParted program bundled with a Linux Live CD/DVD/USB image. The documentation clearly confirms this, and shows the graphical desktop and other available applications, such as a web browser and terminal. enter image description here

If you have doubts that GParted Live is not a standalone program, then you need to boot a GParted Live image. Then open the Terminal application in order to access a shell.
Type uname -a to list the Linux kernel build information. A standalone program would not incorporate a Linux kernel.
Type ps -a to list all the Linux processes currently executing. A standalone program would not have a scheduler running other programs.

FYI a Linux Live CD/DVD/USB image normally exists as a single executable image file. When the Linux OS boots, it uses an initramfs (a special type of filesystem in main memory, somewhat similar to a RAM disk) for its root filesystem. Such an implementation of Linux does not require any drive/disk partition to operate.
Hence your proposal to allocate a partition for each boot choice is unnecessary.

To accomplish various boot choices, you only need a custom boot menu (e.g. using GRUB) and a boot partition or boot directory in a partition. Memtest86+ and a LiveCD/USB image (that may feature a headliner app such as GParted) can each be stored and booted as a simple image file.

A GParted Live image could be a suitable starting point, especially because it has the configuration options available for the GUI at boot time. Expanding the boot menu to offer Memtest86+ should be trivial.
Adding other boot choices could be as easy if they are truly standalone programs. But if the program is another Linux application, then the ideal solution would be a (complicated?) rebuild of the Live image to incorporate that Linux program.

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  • Ok, so what I'm hearing is that, compared to installing these bootable programs on a USB drive, it would work perfectly fine to install them on the PC's internal drive? (even if the exact way that they're installed, using partitions vs a boot manager, etc, are details that should be explored more, the core concept is sound?)
    – ETL
    Commented Sep 30, 2023 at 13:03
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Partitions as such for software of the kind that requires disks to be in "not in use"-state might be one option.

But even easier is using a tool that creates "boot options" of ISO files, i.e. bootable OS-image files.

One such is https://grml.org/ which will allow ISO-files residing in /boot/grml/ to be booted. e.g. you can run your clonezilla (ISO-image) by just selecting it at boot time, freeing up your system's partitions for clean backup creation... and similarly for manipulation and repair of partitions with gparted and ddrescue.

$ dpkg -l | grep grml
ii  grml-rescueboot                               0.5.0                                      all          Integrates Grml ISO booting into GRUB

so:
$ sudo apt-get install grml-rescueboot
... will install a version of it, on Ubuntu's

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  • Interesting answer. This would actually be a primarily-Windows device. I think there's a similar process using Ventoy and Vlinks, although it does require at least one separate partition for Ventoy to reside on, to act as a boot manager.
    – ETL
    Commented Sep 30, 2023 at 13:05

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