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Booting From An ISO File On A Harddisk

This document provides instructions for booting a Linux system from an ISO file using GRUB. It explains that booting from an ISO file allows for easy testing of new releases and custom ISO files. It also provides speed improvements over running programs from the compressed ISO file. The instructions explain how to copy the ISO file, edit the GRUB configuration file to add a new boot entry pointing to the ISO file, and details the format of the boot entry including options for booting persistently by using partitions like casper-rw and home-rw.

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Charles Cunningham
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23 views

Booting From An ISO File On A Harddisk

This document provides instructions for booting a Linux system from an ISO file using GRUB. It explains that booting from an ISO file allows for easy testing of new releases and custom ISO files. It also provides speed improvements over running programs from the compressed ISO file. The instructions explain how to copy the ISO file, edit the GRUB configuration file to add a new boot entry pointing to the ISO file, and details the format of the boot entry including options for booting persistently by using partitions like casper-rw and home-rw.

Uploaded by

Charles Cunningham
Copyright
© Attribution Non-Commercial (BY-NC)
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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How to boot up from the Harddisk using a Linux ISO file.

By Charles

The benefits of booting from a Linux iso file are:

1. Easy to test new releases and ones own remixed iso's

2. Running from a compressed partition means that programs such as OpenOffice and
Gimp launch much quicker - about a 2 to 3 fold speed improvement.

Here are the (belated) instructions for booting an ISO and an example:

Copy the ISO image to a directory that GRUB will be able to find (and that you can specify
easily) . I use: /boot/iso
1.
Amend the GRUB config file - this should be done by editing the
/etc/grub.d/40_custom file, and then running /usr/sbin/grub-mkconfig. Alternatively for
testing you can directly edit the /boot/grub/grub.cfg file but any changes made will be lost
on the next kernel upgrade.
2.
On my systems /boot is on /dev/sda1, this is refered to as (hd0,1) in Grub speak. You
may need to change this
3.
The entry you add should look like:
4.

menuentry "My new boot from ISO" {

set isofile="/boot/iso/myisofile.iso"

loopback loop (hd0,1)$isofile

linux (loop)/casper/vmlinuz boot=casper iso-scan/filename=$isofile noprompt noeject --

initrd (loop)/casper/initrd.lz

If you want to create a persistent boot you need to create partitions on your system with
names. I used gparted to set these up:
1.
casper-rw – this can act as a unionfs for / (including /home if no home-rw is present)
*
home-rw – this will act as a unionfs for /home
*
The grub entry should include the word persistent:
*
menuentry "My new boot from ISO" {

set isofile="/boot/iso/myisofile.iso"

loopback loop (hd0,1)$isofile

linux (loop)/casper/vmlinuz boot=casper iso-scan/filename=$isofile noprompt noeject


persistent --

initrd (loop)/casper/initrd.lz

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