Boot an ISO on an external/internal HD partition.

[Phil]

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?....