Booting from ISO file on HDD

[skewer]

Hello there everyone!

I'd just started to check out linuxbbq and I really love it!

I need some guidance on booting the ISO file from a HDD partition instead of burning to CD or dd to a USB pendrive. That way, I can try out so many linuxbbq direct from the HDD without installing cos I think I'm gonna try out many... and there seems to be new releases all the time! :)

I'm on a multiboot machine using grub2. I'd tried many times on the grub entry but no success so far. Here are some of the entries I'd tried. I just copied some of these entries from the net and try em out. They worked for the usual ubuntus and gparted but not linuxbbq so far. The first two I'd used for gparted while the last two on ubuntu.

Code: Select all

================================================================ START - grub2 entries ================================================================
menuentry "Debian-based - Linux BBQ Cookies" {
    set isofile="/iso/distros/linuxbbq-cookies.iso"
    loopback loop (hd0,7)$isofile
    linux (loop)/live/vmlinuz boot=live config union=aufs noswap noprompt vga=788 ip=frommedia toram=filesystem.squashfs findiso=$isofile
    initrd (loop)/live/initrd.img
}

menuentry "Debian-based - Linux BBQ Old School" {
    set isofile="/iso/distros/linuxbbq-oldschool.iso"
    loopback loop (hd0,7)$isofile
    linux (loop)/live/vmlinuz boot=live live-media=/dev/sda7 config union=aufs noswap noprompt vga=788 ip=frommedia toram=filesystem.squashfs findiso=$isofile
    initrd (loop)/live/initrd.img
}

menuentry "Debian-based - Linux BBQ Cookies" {
    set isofile="/iso/distros/linuxbbq-cookies.iso"
    loopback loop (hd0,7)$isofile
    linux (loop)/live/vmlinuz boot=live iso-scan/filename=$isofile noprompt noeject
    initrd (loop)/live/initrd.img
}

menuentry "Debian-based - Linux BBQ Old School" {
    set isofile="/iso/distros/linuxbbq-oldschool.iso"
    loopback loop (hd0,7)$isofile
    linux (loop)/live/vmlinuz boot=live live-media=/dev/sda7 iso-scan/filename=$isofile noprompt noeject noswap noprompt
    initrd (loop)/live/initrd.img
}
================================================================ END - grub2 entries ================================================================

I'd also attached the 'screenshots' of the error. Hope you guys can help me out!

Thanz!

ivanovnegro: Putting in code tags, looks nicer. :)

[machinebacon]

Hi Skewer,
the method is _actually_ correct, the error you see there with hwdb.bin is an upstream problem of certain kernels. So the screen that boots to the hwdb.bin error is the correct setting for GRUB2, unfortunately. You could try with those releases that use the Debian vanilla kernels (for example all 486 versions, or those which explicitly state _not_ using siduction's towo kernel)

So something like

Code: Select all

menuentry "Debian-based - Linux BBQ Cookies" {
set isofile="/iso/distros/linuxbbq-cookies.iso"
loopback loop (hd0,7)$isofile
linux (loop)/live/vmlinuz boot=live union=aufs verbose 
initrd (loop)/live/initrd.img
}

should be okay.

The filesystem.squashfs, initrd.img and vmlinuz files are on the ISO's /live directory, so the paths are correct. It uses boot=live because we use Debian's live-config for creating them.

Hope it helps, I cannot test it now with different ISOs but I am pretty sure that the kernel is to blame. By the way, for the Cookies release (or any of which use systemd), try to add 'init=/bin/systemd' in the vmlinuz line. Maybe this solves the error where the stick boots into busybox.