Re: Booting CDs with GRUB

[Jochen Hoenicke]

On Sep 12, John McCarthy wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Is it possible to use GRUB to boot a Standard PC (El Torito)
> bootable CDROM?
>
> I find myself needing boot floppies for every bootable CDROM I have
> to allow booting the CDROM on systems without BIOS CDROM-boot
> support.  I'm trying to find a way to have one floppy that can boot
> any El Torito CDROM for these systems.  Is this possible?  (I'm
> beginning to doubt it)

No that isn't possible with GRUB.  You would need a cdrom driver for
this.  GRUB doesn't provide any disk drivers but uses the BIOS to
access hard disk or floppy.  So it can't even access the CD-ROM unless
the BIOS supports this.

You may try the smart boot manager at http://btmgr.sourceforge.net/ 
I haven't tried it myself but it claims to have support for ATAPI
CD-ROMS.

  Jochen