Re: Booting from a bootable ISO

[Rustom Mody]

On Mon, Apr 7, 2014 at 12:18 AM, Andrey Borzenkov <address@hidden> wrote:

В Sun, 6 Apr 2014 23:09:40 +0530

Rustom Mody <address@hidden> пишет:

> 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

You need resident driver providing emulated CD driver. grub does not
include one. For BIOS systems the easiest way is to use memdisk (which
is part of syslinux project indeed) which can be booted by grub. See
http://www.syslinux.org/wiki/index.php/MEMDISK

Thanks!

Just FYI (and anyone else stumbling on this thread). I did:
apt-install grub-image-boot

Added some iso images to /boot/images

Updated grub

Now I find these in grub menu

And they seem to run (minimally at least)

So now next question -- How safe is it?

Sorry if the question sounds unreasonable :-) but it can be also put like this:

Put an (freedos-based) iso on CD and boot machine

vs

Put iso in /boot/images and boot with grub and (Syslinux??) Memdisk

How different are these running environments from the point-of-view of the running ISO?

Thanks
Rusi