Re: Boot isoimages from HD?

[Marco Gerards]

Thomas Bettler <address@hidden> writes:

> Will it be possible to boot isoimages from HD with grub2?
> This would be a really crazy feature!

Crazy indeed. ;)

The problem would be that you would have to load the entire image into
memory or a blocklist, which can be huge as well, depending on the
fragmentation.

After that el torito emulation is required.  In that case all
operating systems that can deal with it will be able to boot from this
image.  But most sane operating systems will just access the hardware
directly, GNU/Linux for example.  In that case it will just ignore the
emulated CDROM drive.

So the best thing we can do is writing some "loopback" support for GRUB
2.  This is on my long term todo list already.  Using this "loopback"
support you can load files like kernels, etc. from a CDROM image.  But
this does not make it possible to boot from a CDROM image, just to
load a kernel or so from there.

So basically, the answer is no unless someone else has a good idea how
to implement this.

--
Marco