Creating a multiboot USB drive

One of the more frustrating downsides to the recent rise in popularity of netbooks is the difficulty in installing an operating system without an optical drive. The traditional way around this issue was to do a network install, using something like Microsoft's Remote Installation Services or Windows Deployment Services, which is fine if you have the infrastructure already in place, but overkill for the average user - having to set up a domain and then create images is a lengthy process if all you want to do is install Windows on your new computer. One of the most popular solutions for this increasingly common issue is to install from a USB flash memory drive. There are applications readily available on the Internet that will take your standard USB flash memory drive and turn it into a bootable drive from which you can install Windows.

This got me thinking; wouldn't it be great to have a USB drive with all the versions of Windows that you install regularly? A quick search on google yielded some helpful but incomplete instructions on how to achieve this, but fortunately after many days of tweaking, I have been able to create a USB drive with the following operating systems;

Windows XP Professional x86 with SP3
Windows XP Professional x64 with SP2
Windows Vista Starter, Home Basic, Home Premium, Business, Ultimate and Enterprise x86 with SP1
Windows Vista Home Basic, Home Premium, Business, Ultimate and Enterprise x64 with SP1
Windows Server 2008 Standard, Enterprise, Datacenter full and Server Core x86 and x64

Which, by my count, is 13 client and 12 server operating systems, all installable from a single 8GB USB flash drive. With some further research and modification of the method, I was also able to create a bootable USB hard disk drive with the above, as well as a number of additional utilities including;

 Acronis True Image Server
memtest
 GParted
WinPE,
Ultimate Boot CD
BartPE

This is an extremely powerful tool, especially to the IT professional who has to work on a range of systems that may not have working optical drives, or simply doesn't want to carry 10+ discs around with them at all times.

Over the next few posts, I will give instructions on how to create these bootable USB drives. The majority of these instructions come from various sources on the Internet, mainly the forums at msfn.org. I will list the sources I used as I go along, although I apologise in advance if I do not credit somebody for their work - I do not recall where I got all of the information from. So, that's the preamble and scenario dealt with; onto the guide!