USB drive boot manager

Hi /prog/

I have windows installed to one HDD, and *nix to another. ATM i use the BIOS to switch between drives at boot. This is because I want each drive to remain bootable on its own [eg if i brick one of the two OSes]. Obviously this isn't very efficient.

I'd like to have a boot manager installed on a USB drive to select between which to boot, but I want to avoid doing anything that modifies the drives so that they become unbootable without the USB stick either.

Can you point me in the direction of some software that can do this? I've looked at Plop, YUMI, GRUB and LILO but i'm not really sure which best suits my needs, and if its possible to use them in the way i describe [from USB stick, with USB keyboard and without modifying their MBR etc].

Ok so i got bored of flogging a dead horse; i wiped PCBSD and installed unbuntu studio on half the disk. conveniently, unbuntu studio is polite enough to ask where you want the bootloader installed, so I installed it to the USB stick and pretty much got the effect I wanted (im not sure if unbuntu will boot without the USB stick in, but at this point i barely care).

then i re-installed PCBSD on the other half of the disk. but it doesnt show in grub at boot time (ubuntu still does though and boots ok), how do i go about adding it to the menu.lst? When I browse the USB stick it appears empty. I gather at boot I should be able to edit the menu from the grub> command line.
worst case I'll re-install ubuntu seeing as it ought to auto-detect PCBSD and add it to the grub menu, but thats pretty inefficient.

>>26
that slows down the boot time (which is already painfully long because my board has 2 different ACHI controllers it needs to initalise). Plus won't one of them pretty much be redundant/useless when I replace/insert a new disk?

>>24
you make it sound so easy. perhaps you'd like to show me how its done?


Also, what is the best way to access my nix partions (ufs and ext3) from windows? I noted that someone pointed out that 'then you loose all the linux security: everyone can access your (encrypted password), your (encrypted) ssh key'. Would it be better than to have a shared NTFS drive for data instead/only? What do YOU do?