Re: Booting from a bootable ISO

[Rustom Mody]

On Sun, Apr 6, 2014 at 11:09 PM, Rustom Mody <address@hidden> wrote:

On Sun, Apr 6, 2014 at 10:34 PM, Andrey Borzenkov <address@hidden> wrote:

В Sun, 6 Apr 2014 22:10:25 +0530
Rustom Mody <address@hidden> пишет:

> Many people -- in particular hardware vendors -- are nowadays supplying
> bootable ISO's.
> You have to
> 1. Download the ISO
> 2. Burn a CD
> 3. Boot with it
> 4. Follow the instructions (to (re)flash the motherboard/CP/Disk etc)
>
> Ive already been able to boot ubuntu from an iso on disk
> Next Ive done it with making a grub-bootable usb and loop-mounting the iso
> from there
>
> So now to boot from a general (ie non linux) bootable ISO?
>

I do not think it is possible in general case. For a start, program
that would be started from ISO may need access to CD/DVD which is
possible only if system firmware (BIOS/EFI) actually see device.

Sorry....

Maybe I focused on the wrong aspect -- hardware flashing.

So to correct that:

1. I believe that Isolinux can do this

2. These ISOs are (often) under the control of FreeDos

So maybe I rephrase my question as:

How to boot a Freedos based system from grub2?

Just for reference the contents of the ISO:

$ find . -exec file {} \;
.: directory
./Autorun.inf: ASCII text, with CRLF line terminators
./BCDW: directory
./BCDW/bcdw.bin: data
./BCDW/bcdw.ini: ASCII text, with CRLF line terminators
./BCDW/bcdwboot.bin: DOS/MBR boot sector
./drivedetect.exe: PE32 executable (GUI) Intel 80386, for MS Windows, UPX compressed
./FreeDOS: directory
./FreeDOS/ke2035asrc.zip: Zip archive data, at least v1.0 to extract
./FreeDOS/LICENSE.TXT: Pascal source, ASCII text, with CRLF line terminators
./PH-CC49.ima: DOS/MBR boot sector, Free-DOS Bootloader
./README.txt: Non-ISO extended-ASCII text, with CRLF line terminators
./seglogo.ico: floppy with old FAT filesystem 320k, Media descriptor 0xff

[ke2035asrc.zip looks like FreeDos sources]