Hi,

I have a Fat32 partition on which I want to extract several Linux live CDs and be able to boot them with GRUB.

The partition has several subfolders with each Live CD iso extracted into it:

partition:
/DamnSmallLinux
/Ubuntu8.04
/SuSe
/GPartedLiveCD
...
...

I know how to use Grub and even got DSL to run (although only in text mode - it doesn't boot into the WindowManager).

I know it is impossible to directly boot from an ISO file (or has this changed by now?). But there should be a way to boot an extracted ISO the way it would boot if I burned this ISO on a CDRom and booted it from there.

Also it should be a general way, i.e. no special config for every other Distribution in GRUB.

Is it perhaps possible to just tell GRUB to call IsoLinux in a general way, since all Live CDs use Isolinux to boot?


Cheers,
sb

If you want to try and test that much different distributions without putting each on it's own partition, then I would rather suggest you install vmware or vmware-player. That way you can boot each iso-file as a virtual machine. You can also use VirtualBox or Quemu, but so far I had the best experiences with similar attempts by using vmware.

Having all those distro's on a single partition - even worse: a FAT32 partition - is something that I doubt that it will work, though I don't rule out that it is maybe possible somehow. It will certainly be complicated and painful.

Linux Archive

I have my use cases.

Fat32 is no problem. This are no production systems! This are anyway live-CDs, no Linux installs!

Also I do not want to just test them. All Linux distros should be bootable after a restart.

So VmWare is no option!!!



Cheers,
sb