Question

[Andy Canfield]

I have a question. Bruce Dubbs said "Ask on the grub-devel site".

I went to http://www.gnu.org/software/grub/grub-development.html and read this:

Those interested in its development should subscribe to the developers' mailing list. As this list is a members-only list, please subscribe to it then send e-mail to this list.

Maybe I must subscribe to "the developer's mailing list" in order to be able to get an answer to my question. So I clicked on the link, and what I got was a blank e-mail addressed to "address@hidden". So I am asking. If I must subscribe to the mailing list to get the answer, please sign me up.

Here is the question:

Why can't grub boot from an standard bootable CD?

I have many such CD's, such as the Microsoft Windows 98 install CD. Why can't grub boot from that? There must be a technical reason, but nobody says what it is. Grub can boot from all kinds of hard disks, and from diskettes; why not CD's?

I started on an IBM 360/20 many decades ago. You dialed "0080" on the CPU and pressed the "LOAD" button. The CPU read the first card into address 0x0080 and jumped to it. I still think of booting in terms of "read it into memory and jump to it". Certainly grub should be able to use the BIOS to read the CD into memory and jump to that memory image. Why can the BIOS do that, but grub cannot?

Thank you.