How to easily make multiboot menu on external drive?

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Hello all.

I have a 1TB hard drive in an external USB3.1 caddy that I would like to set up for multiboot on some specific machines that HDD speed wouldn’t really matter for. I have a few concerns though, and ATM am out the door to work, so I need to be quick.

1: How many boots could I have? If I were to use something like Grub, is there a max?

2: Does it matter what boot to use? Grub LiLo CloVer?

3: Can I have it set so one partition that is like 400GB of storage pops up when I plug in to any computer? And only that partition, not every linux partition? I’d like the bootable sectors to be completely separate from the storage, and for neither to interfere with one another.

4: If I were to format the drive in GPT, does anyone know if that would cause an issue for powermacs? Specifically a DDR2PBook. I wouldn’t… THINK so? But I have no clue. I want to be able to use the drive between Intel/AMD hardware, POWER hardware, and be able to mount it for storage on either.

I’d like to have 3 or 4 netboot ISO’s on it, 2 OS’s, and then a blob for backups and dumps when I have to rescue a system or set up a new one.

Optimally I would do this with an SSD of some sort, but atm its all on a spinnydoodle. Most likely HGST, its a G Drive. One of those on sale specials.

Thanks all.

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Boot Menus generally mention all connected devices internally separate [multiple drives get ID’d, maybe with a bias order, if set in BIOS]. IF working off an external [like a thumb drive], it’ll only be read as 1 item [“Removable USB Drive”]

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if you use grub and set up a ton of partitions on the drive that are small. what you want is possible but not very clean or fast to set up.

make sure to note partition paths for setting up OS’s a small slip could make you have to do it all over again.
and if i am not mistaken you can use different file systems on different partitions on the same drive.
if you want shared storage you will need to pick a file system for the storage partition that all of the OS’s that you want to have access to it are able to read it.
( please note that windows loves to break grub on same disk installs)

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