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#1 2009-06-22 13:01:59

ThomasR
Member
Registered: 2008-05-29
Posts: 5

Grub2, an experiment with loopback iso booting..

For the past few days I have been playing around with Grub2 on my 8GB usb flash drive. My goal is create a mutli-boot usb disk for pc repair, without having a separate partitions for each distribution. Then I found a blog post about booting driectly from the ISO with grub2: http://michael-prokop.at/blog/2009/05/2 … via-grub2/

So I figured why not start with the Archlinux install cd since i use it as my main OS. To my suprise it actually works to a point. The kernel did start to boot but failed when it tried to look for the boot device, because it can't find the CD. So I am wondering is there a way to boot the entire archlinux install iso to ram? Or possibly just boot the archlinux usb img from grub2 using the loopback method? Im stumped at this point...
If anyone can point me in the right direction that would be great! big_smile Let me know if you need additional information...

My usb disk is partitioned like so:

hd0,1     4GB FAT32
hd0,2     4GB ext2 /boot  <-Grub2 is installed here

My iso file is on the 2nd partition in the /iso folder.

Here is the usb /boot/grub/grub.cfg

# Load modules
insmod vbe

# Timeout for menu
set timeout=10

# Set default boot entry as Entry 0
set default=0

# Archlinux 32-bit install
menuentry "Archlinux install 32-bit" {
   loopback loop (hd0,2)/iso/archlinux-2009.02-core-i686.iso
   linux    (loop)/boot/vmlinuz26 findiso=/iso/archlinux-2009.02-core-i686.iso lang=en locale=en_US.UTF-8 usbdelay=10 ramdisk_size=75%
   initrd   (loop)/boot/archiso_pata.img
   boot
}

Thanks for reading! big_smile

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#2 2009-07-06 09:38:15

Blayder
Member
Registered: 2006-07-29
Posts: 43

Re: Grub2, an experiment with loopback iso booting..

Did you try to use isofrom instead of findiso?

it's just that this line

Tip: starting with grml 2009.05(-rc1) you can also use findiso=/path/to/grml.iso instead of isofrom=/dev/sdX/path/to/grml.iso.

confuses me a bit.

But it is a very nice and cool idea smile Gonna give it a try this evening and report back what i'll get...

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#3 2009-07-13 18:09:08

m-p{3}
Member
From: Montreal
Registered: 2009-07-13
Posts: 1
Website

Re: Grub2, an experiment with loopback iso booting..

I'm really curious to see if it can be done.

That would save me from carrying all those installation / rescue CDs with me all the time, and I wouldn't need to burn a new CD everytime there is a new version out.

I'm also wondering if it could be possible to boot a non-grml based CD, like the Windows XP installation ISO file using a chainloader.

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