I like having a bootable partition on my external drives and larger USB flash drives. This makes a great emergency rescue, cloning device or a bootable private PC environment without disrupting the actual computer and without taking up much space on the external drive.
The 2 bootable images I like to use on external devices are:
There is a cost involved with Parted Magic, but MiniOS is a newer free contender and really unique with a restorable session ability. Here I am going to explain how I easily make any USB or external drive bootable but still contain a large area for loose data.
Create a FAT32 partition on the external device that can contain the ISO of the bootable image you want to extract. On a 1tb external drive, I carve out 8gb, then the remaining is NTFS.
Open the ISO image you downloaded with an archive utility. Extract the contents onto the FAT32 partition. Below, I am using the XArchiver tool that is included with the XFCE desktop.
That’s it! Now you have a bootable external drive if you need it, or it can still be used as a regular loose data storage device.
