boot direct from an iso

Scott D. Davilla davilla at 4pi.com
Tue May 13 16:32:09 BST 2008


>>On Monday 12 May 2008 17:48:05 Scott D. Davilla wrote:
>>
>>
>>>I've seen references to this but have been unable to get it to work
>>>and am wondering if it's even possible.
>>>
>>>This would be to boot the LiveCD using a iso instead of the extracted
>>>contents from an iso. The references that I have seen are "find_iso="
>>>and "iso=". Obviously this mean that the correct kernel and initramfs
>>>would need to be extracted for the iso in the first place.
>>>
>>>Thanks
>>>Scott
>>>
>>>    
>>>
>>
>>If you find out how, let me know, because ever since early alpha 
>>gutsy's, I cant do it.
>>I remember trying to do it on those alpha gutsy's isos, and got all 
>>those framebuffer problems, and couldn't finish my install.
>>I tried again on hardy alpha isos, but the hd-boot installer was 
>>unable to find the iso, even though it was on the root a specially 
>>prepared partition.
>>
>>
>>
>I saw some references to this in the casper source, but nothing 
>definitive.  Do you recall what Alpha they stopped showing up?  We 
>can look at bzr history to see what happened.
>

There's a "bootfrom=" boot param in casper. It's the same as 
"live-media". Seems to want a device, not a device/file path.

I see in google searchs knoppix refs to "bootfrom=/dev/sdb1/*.iso" 
but that might be knoppix specific. There's another casper param the 
can specify an offset where an iso can be located. The casper script 
does a losetup using this so If you make a partition, then dd the iso 
to the partition, that might work. but it seems silly. If I go to the 
trouble of making a partition, I'll just copy the contents of the iso 
into it (remembering to copy ".disk") and skip the middleman.

An "apt-get source casper" in Mythbuntu gusty show most all 
command-line params stripped from the script that parses the 
command-line params. The casper script still references these params 
but without them being parsed from the command-line, no joy in gusty. 
I still have to check hardys casper.





More information about the Ubuntu-installer mailing list