YUMI Multiboot USB Creator

My brother asked me to clean up his Acer Aspire One netbook. It had some viruses and was locking up. All of my tools that I use for this sort of thing are on boot CDs. Alas, the netbook doesn't have a CD/DVD drive. So I had to move my tools to USB thumb drives.

It seemed a waste of time and space to have to use a separate USB drive for each of my CDs. I started looking for a way to combine my tools onto a single drive. After some searching I came across YUMI. It is a Windows program that allows you to install multiple operating systems, system tools, antivirus programs, etc. onto a single USB drive. Perfect.

YUMI takes an iso file and copies its contents to the USB drive and creates the appropriate menu entries. YUMI has a list of certain software that it can work with, but if your tool isn't in the list it also has an option to try booting an unknown ISO image.

There is no installation process for YUMI, just download and run. After you agree to the license, the main dialog is displayed.

Select the drive letter that corresponds to your USB drive. You want to make sure you choose the correct drive.

Next choose the software you want to add from the list.

Next, browse to the ISO file and select it. YUMI looks for particular filenames, so if you have a different version than what is expected, you can browse to the folder containing the ISO and then enter *.iso in the filename box in order to find the ISO file.

After selecting the ISO the filename will change from red to green. Notice I used *.iso to select a different filename than what was expected.

Click Create and YUMI will put everything into place. Continue adding tools as needed.

With the price of USB thumb drives these days, YUMI is great for consolidating all your tools and live CDs onto a single USB drive. I now have all of my most used tools on one 8GB USB drive. This is exactly what I was looking for.