[Grml] Booting an ISO image

[Michael Prokop]

* Roberto Murer <roberto.murer at poste.it> [20060606 16:15]:

>  I am playing with a new laptop, and before touching its partitions I wanted to 
>  use the bootfrom cheatcode to boot from the ISO image.
>  I am using a Dell Inspiron 9400, which has a SATA hard disk which comes with 
>  Windows on its second partition. I created /grml/boot in C:\ with the contents 
>  of isolinux from the cd, and copied grub.iso to C:\

>  This is from my menu.lst from GRUB residing on a NTFS partition:

>  default=0
>  timeout=7

>  title "grml"
>  root (hd0,1)
>  kernel /grml/boot/linux26 ramdisk_size=100000 init=/etc/init lang=it 
>  apm=power-off vga=791 nomce quiet BOOT_IMAGE=grml bootfrom=/dev/sda2/GRML.ISO
>  initrd /grml/boot/minirt26.gz

>  I can reach my GRUB menu, and kernel and initrd seem to load. Then I reach the 
>  place where the script looks for GRML in /dev/hd*, and my image is not found. 
>  Of course, I am then left at a minimal prompt.
>  If I boot from the CD I can see the contents of the hard disk.

>  What to do to let the kernel find the ISO?

Ok, I tried to verify this. First of all I put grml_0.7.iso into C:\
- known as /dev/hda1 on my box.  Then booting from CD using:

  grml bootfrom=/dev/hda1/grml_0.7.iso

works for me. Next step was copying isolinux-stuff from the grml-ISO
to C:\ and adjust grub on the linux system (I don't have a grub
including the NTFS-patch). And yes: it does not work here too. ;-)

The relevant initrd code works with the fromhd=/dev/... variant
described in "Boot grml without CD" at http://wiki.grml.org/doku.php?id=tips

The tohd-cheatcode does not work with NTFS yet (due to its
limitations and possible risks on linux), so to use fromhd from NTFS
requires manual input. Therefore your method would be nice, yes.

I've to figure out how bootfrom=... could work running from harddisk
as well, I've put it on my todolist. If I find a way how to solve it
expect to find a corresponding entry in the changelog of the next
release. ;)

regards,
-mika-
-- 
Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.
		-- F. Brooks, "The Mythical Man-Month"
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