Re: How to prepare an ISO 9660 CD for booting via GRUB ?

["Thomas Schmitt" <scdbackup@gmx.net>]

Hi,

Vladimir '?-coder/phcoder' Serbinenko wrote:
> - Is it possible to declare the whole iso for hard-disk emulation for
> providing emulating image for buggy BIOSes

libisofs.h describes type ELTORITO_HARD_DISC_EMUL
with API call iso_image_set_boot_image().
http://bazaar.launchpad.net/%7Elibburnia-team/libisofs/scdbackup/annotate/head%3A/libisofs/libisofs.h

To my knowledge this is not tested yet.
xorriso surely has no option to trigger it.
But that is easily implemented as soon as a
sincere tester shows up.


> - Is it possible to have HFS support in xorriso? It would allow merging
> PPC grub-mkrescue into generic one.

Ouch.

In principle it should work like Joliet:
A complete second directory tree that co-exists
with the ECMA-119/RockRidge tree. They only
share data file contents.
But i have no clue of HFS. Actually i use any
possible excuse to not start working on UDF.

I can promise to help integrating HFS into
libisofs if somebody shows up who has the
necessary HFS knowledge and comprehensive
testing capabilities.


>>   --modification-date         Override modification date
> this is needed to know the creation date (which is use as disk
> identifier in GRUB) before image is complete.

Should not be a big problem. libisofs will get a
new API call for that.
Are there more add-on options which i should
implement ?


>>   --protective-msdos-label    Patch a protective DOS-style label
> This one adds a simple partition table spanning across whole image of
> type 0xCD

To bytes 446 - 509 of the image ?
Type 0xCD in byte 450 ?
Eventually into the data provided by 
--embedded-boot ?
(Does it make sense without --embedded-boot ?)

Syslinux isohybrid rounds up the image size
to full MB. (I understand because it sets
64 heads * 32 sectors = 2048 * 512 bytes
per cylinder)
Is that necessary with --protective-msdos-label ?

There must also a curb of nominal cylinder count
(bytes 452,453) to 10 bits.

Does that sound reasonable ?


Have a nice day :)

Thomas