I’m looking for an application that I thought would be pretty easy to find but apparently nobody has thought of this idea.

I’m a computer technician, and as one, I carry around discs. Applications, operating systems and rescue discs, as well as drivers and backups.
Last month I bought brand new portable external hard drive with 320GB of space and I couldn’t be happier, all those CDs/DVDs I use to carry around with me, I can now just make into ISOs and use DAEMON Tools or Power ISO to mount them as a virtual drive.

The problem is, I can’t do this with BOOTABLE discs.
So I still need to carry around all my rescue discs and operating system install discs.

I WISH there was a program that I can install on my external drive, along with a folder called ISO’S that whenever I connect my external hard drive to a new computer, I choose to boot from it and it loads a virtual drive and gives me a list of the ISOs files available on the folder.

I choose the ISO, and the program boots from it.

A PRE-OS Virtual Drive Manager!

That would save me so much time and make my job a lot easier, plus I can stop carrying discs around and just use my hard drive for everything!

Has anybody seen anything like that around? Anything at all?

Please let me know!

Like suggested on boot-land.net, you can try grub4dos.
Grub4dos only can emulate a CD drive when the processor is running in real mode (dos based iso's).
When the processor is running in protected mode (windows, linux, ...), the emulation is gone. Those iso's will boot partitally (first stage is in real mode), but as soon as the processor switches in protected mode, the iso can't be seen anymore.

Which iso's do you want to boot?
Look at http://www.ultimatebootcd.com/forums/viewforum.php?f=6 for tutorials on how to integrate different other programs in UBCD.

Windows XP, Windows Vista, Windows 98, Windows 95, Windows 2000,
Slax, Knoppix, Ultimate Boot CD, Mac OSX 10.5, CloneSheep, Norton Ghost,


ONE DRIVE TO RULE THEM ALL

Have you seen "A grub menu booting 100+ systems of Dos, Windows, Linux, BSD and Solaris" ( http://www.justlinux.com/forum/showthread.php?threadid=143973 )?

I have 3 flavors of Linux, Win3.1, 98b and XP bootable from one 80GB USBHD.

This isn't bad, but I wanted a solution that's a little bit quicker and requires less setup time. I need a solution that work on lots of hard drives and is easy to manipulate and setup by anyone.

Well once you had it setup its ready to go...you would just mirror the drive to another drive and it will be on the other drive.

The issue is setting it up. Im thinking about it right now and would use grub. Im curious about this too...seeing as I have tried before to install windows (specifically vista ultimate 64bit) from a usb hd and had issues with it installing...it worked up till about the configuring windows screen, and then didnt work right..and I dont know why. Might of been a bad HD because it was an old hard drive.

Im curious how this would be set up...but because if i understand this correctly...he wants the install discs and live cds aswell. Im not sure how to go about that other than start with ubcd, and add what you can (live cds because thats easy) then have an option to boot to grub and then let grub take over and boot partitions that contain the contents of the install discs, unless there is a way to use ubcd and install windows from it.

I want to personally know more about this aswell because would be highly useful for me aswell. (going into the computer tech field aswell)

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