Boot an ISO on an external/internal HD partition.

Boot an ISO on an external/internal HD partition.

[Phil]

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Hi all,  my name's phil and i'm not a programmer - other than writing 
perl scripts to make my working day easier - but i haven't joined this 
list as a coding member.  I had an idea that i thought should go public 
to see if it was possible to do.  In short my idea is this:

Have a Fat32 partition that can have a bootable ISO stored on it - Fat32 
for Win/Linux compatibility - that can itself be booted.  eliminating 
the need to burn disks and eliminating the possibility of read errors 
through dust, finger prints or misuse.

Possible Uses:

    * A developer is building a bootable CD and wants to test it before
      wasting a disk s/he could put Boot.ISO in the root of this
      partition and have Grub boot it like a normail CD.
    * A person with a USB HDD could have an OS installation ISO on a
      special partition for off site repairs/installs etc.
    * When ever a live CD is updated you don't have wasted disks, just
      overwritten data.
    * Ability to have a continually patched installation source that has
      all of the latest software on it - FC4 has changed a bit since it
      was first released and updates after installing takes AGES!!

I have built an external Rescue Drive that has FC4 on the first 16GB and 
NTFS for the other 200GB, my plan is to use this device for recovering 
data from windows pc's that have turned bad and then doing the full 
format reinstall all from the one rererewriteable hard disk.

My thinking is that if BIOS can boot any CD and most bootable CD's are 
downloaded in ISO form then logic says you /could/ boot straight from an 
ISO...

does anyone think this has merrit??

Regards,

Phil


p.s. can you force a partition to have CDFS as it's type?....

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Re: Boot an ISO on an external/internal HD partition.

[Marco Gerards]

Phil <philbert@internode.on.net> writes:

> Hi all,  my name's phil and i'm not a programmer - other than writing
> perl scripts to make my working day easier - but i haven't joined this
> list as a coding member.  I had an idea that i thought should go
> public to see if it was possible to do.  In short my idea is this:
>
> Have a Fat32 partition that can have a bootable ISO stored on it -
> Fat32 for Win/Linux compatibility - that can itself be booted.
> eliminating the need to burn disks and eliminating the possibility of
> read errors through dust, finger prints or misuse.

Sorry, but this unfortunately possible in a general way.  The only
thing that is possible is loading files from an ISO 9660 filesystem
that is stored in another filesystem (the situation like you
described).  But loading a file is not enough to boot an OS, the OS
just does not understand what is going on.

So if you want an OS stored on a ISO 9660 image to understand such
setup, the only option is modifying the OS.  In the case of GNU/Linux,
you might have a look at using a loopback filesystem as the root
filesystem.  How to make this possible is not in the scope of this
list.  When the kernel supports it, you can use the GRUB 2 `loopback'
command.

But because you are not a developer (as it seems) who is interested in
hacking kernels, you just have to know it is not possible.

--
Marco

Re: Boot an ISO on an external/internal HD partition.

[leslie.polzer]

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On Sun, Feb 19, 2006 at 11:58:27AM +1030, Phil wrote:

>    * A developer is building a bootable CD and wants to test it before
> wasting a disk s/he could put Boot.ISO in the root of this partition
> and have Grub boot it like a normail CD.
Developers usually use a virtual machine like bochs or qemu for this.

  Leslie

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