Is it possible to create a boot CD to boot external volumes on an Apple iMac 7.1 (which has an older firmware version and cannot boot external disks, unlike the MacBook Pro 5.1 which can do it, at least with grub-legacy which is all I'll ever use until EFI boot becomes available). There is some promising stuff on
www.pendrivelinux.com, and I'll try it, but the instructions are for Windows, and I am not sure how to translate the menu.lst entry to linux (I suppose it would have to be entered in the "automagic" section). Of course I don't want to create a bootable flash drive but to use my external volumes that already boot on the MacBook Pro without altering them, except for installing the ATI video driver (but I have no problem booting in low graphics mode). Until karmic there was a trick to make the iMac mistake the external volume for an internal one (the root partition had to have the same UUID as the internal root partition), but this does not seem to work for lucid. Anyway this UUID trick is dirty and causes problems when you want to edit the internal partition (which is the point of the external boot - you get a customized maintenance environment that boots much faster than the CD).
