Re: Booting from a bootable ISO

[Andrey Borzenkov]

В Sun, 6 Apr 2014 23:09:40 +0530
Rustom Mody <address@hidden> пишет:

> On Sun, Apr 6, 2014 at 10:34 PM, Andrey Borzenkov <address@hidden>wrote:
> 
> > В Sun, 6 Apr 2014 22:10:25 +0530
> > Rustom Mody <address@hidden> пишет:
> >
> > > Many people -- in particular hardware vendors -- are nowadays supplying
> > > bootable ISO's.
> > > You have to
> > > 1. Download the ISO
> > > 2. Burn a CD
> > > 3. Boot with it
> > > 4. Follow the instructions (to (re)flash the motherboard/CP/Disk etc)
> > >
> > > Ive already been able to boot ubuntu from an iso on disk
> > > Next Ive done it with making a grub-bootable usb and loop-mounting the
> > iso
> > > from there
> > >
> > > So now to boot from a general (ie non linux) bootable ISO?
> > >
> >
> > I do not think it is possible in general case. For a start, program
> > that would be started from ISO may need access to CD/DVD which is
> > possible only if system firmware (BIOS/EFI) actually see device.
> >
> >
> Sorry....
> Maybe I focused on the wrong aspect -- hardware flashing.
> 
> So to correct that:
> 1. I believe that Isolinux can do this

You need resident driver providing emulated CD driver. grub does not
include one. For BIOS systems the easiest way is to use memdisk (which
is part of syslinux project indeed) which can be booted by grub. See
http://www.syslinux.org/wiki/index.php/MEMDISK 

For other platforms supported by GRUB - does not know.

> 2. These ISOs are (often) under the control of FreeDos
> 
> So maybe I rephrase my question as:
> How to boot a Freedos based system from grub2?