Anyone use Grub4dos to boot Linux ISO files?

[MikeHunt79]

I've got a USB stick with various Linux ISO's which I can boot using Grub4dos. It's quite a clever bit of software, and Ubuntu seems to work well.

I'm trying to get CrunchBang to boot and am having no luck. Has anyone managed to pull it off?

 

[eXor]

Just tried a similar thing today, using Grub 2. I installed Grub 2 into the MBR of the USB stick, then created /boot/grub/grub.cfg containing the following:

menuentry		"Ubuntu 10.04" {
loopback loop /boot/iso/ubuntu-10.04-desktop-i386.iso
linux (loop)/casper/vmlinuz boot=casper iso-scan/filename=/boot/iso/ubuntu-10.04-desktop-i386.iso noeject noprompt --
initrd (loop)/casper/initrd.lz
}

Worked like a charm.

Apparently, this ISO booting method doesn't work for all ISOs. You couldn't launch, say, a Windows 7 ISO.

Might be worth loop mounting the CrunchBang ISO and looking for clues:

Path and name of initrd, initrd.gz? initrd.img?

Path and name of kernel, vmlinuz? bZimage?

Armed with this info, you could try something like :

menuentry "CrunchBang" {
loopback loop (hd0,1)/boot/crunchbang.iso
linux (loop)/live/vmlinuz isofrom=/dev/sda1/boot/crunchbang.iso boot=live quiet noeject noprompt
initrd (loop)/live/initrd.img
}

 

[MikeHunt79]

Thanks, I'll give the loop mounting thing a try. It's a shame that it doesn't work with all ISO files right now but I'm hoping that maybe more will be supported in the future.

Still, many of the more lightweight ubuntu variants seem to work fine with this method, so I'm going to give some of them a try and I'm seeing which distro works well on an older Netbook with no CD drive and a real slow SSD.