Hi

I have an iso which is 4.5GB .I want to put this on a flash drive and boot it from the flash drive.
I want to keep the iso file as it is and not extract it in the flash drive
So if i have mytest.iso then i want to keep this mytest.iso file on the flash drive too. So that when i make a new iso i just have to copy paste the new iso in the flash drive and everything else remains the same.
The problem currently is i have to write a DVD everytime i make a change or fix a bug in a iso and writing a DVD take hours and i get to work in 4 or 5th try.
Hence the need of flash drive.
I have gone through Grub4Dos ,extlinux
Grub4dos wont work as its more than 4gb iso.


Hope to receive a reply

Welcome to LQ niravshah!

Now, that's not the normal way to boot linux off usb...

However, we need more info too
what distro are you using?
flash is fat32 or ext3?
extlinux is for booting linux filesystem, not fat16/32

Please explain more to us, and what iso your trying to put on usb.

Well since the iso is more than 4GB i cannot use fat the file system of the flash drive is ext2 .

The iso i am trying to boot is a RHEL5 with my software configured in it .
i have a bootable iso of it but i want to put it on a flash drive to make things faster since burning a DVD is pain

Let me know if u need any other information

Hi guys i would really appreciate if some could direct me in the right direction

Hello niravshah
yes we need more info
Please post isolinux.cfg
for your iso?

Does it make a difference what iso it is.
All I want to do is get the iso bootloader to work without extracting the ISO.I was hoping that once I get this to work it would work with any iso.

While googling i came across this link which promises to do exactly what I want but it does not tell me how to do it.

It may make a difference what iso
grml has this abiity to boot from iso, as does sidux and others
but redhat??

first you gotta install grub2 somehow?
have you tried installing grub2 from source or binary?

The ISO I have is a redhat ISO like I said so this iso will install the OS so it would be a virgin machine

I installed grub2 on fedora and I think it worked .I can say this because
when I reboor i see the boot menu changed.

I have no idea what is grml and sidux.
Have you gone through the link I posted in the previous reply because that is exactly what i want.

Thanks for your help
Nirav Shah

Isn't fedora redhat based?

here's info on booting and installing fedora with no cdrom using hd/usb partition
using just regualar GRUB

seems, like sidux, you boot off the kernel and intird that are not in the iso
meaning mount the iso, copy kernel/initrd to a folder somewhwere
then edit menu.lst

see this stuff too
http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?t=191888
http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?t=194202

This is not what I want.
I want to boot a iso be it any iso.
The iso is in the flash drive which I don't think is possible with regular grub.

When i plug in the flash drive and set my bios to boot from usb it should exactly like booting from a bootable DVD

I hope you understand what I mean
I am not very good at explaining things. Sorry for this


Thanks
Nirav Shah

No, I under stand
right now I am writing you from sidux-2009-02 which is booting off th iso via my ext3 usb
here is my menu.lst, note the "fromiso" entry

not all distro's have this ability, unless I'm mistaken?

now here's the fedora one, which should be similar if redhat can do this

just change the "root=" setting

I don't know if redhat can do this, but if fedora can, why not redhat?

that's exactly what I'm doing now
booting off usb via the kernel/initrd in sidux folder
there is also sidux iso in sidux folder which is mounted at boot
as read-only
then there is a folder named "fll" where all settings, apps installed, etc remain as persistent; ie, a frugal install

Wow This looks very promising.
But i am a new baby to linux so it would be more helpful to me if you could tell me in steps what I need to do.
I know this is asking for to much but where to I start and how to get this don't on a flash drive.
I would surely give it a try.

Thanks
Nirav

Don't get your hopes up yet, as I'm not sure if redhat can do this
is fedora redhat based???

did you read the links about booting fedora via iso?
try just replacing their menu.lst with kernel/initrd from your dvd iso
and whatnot

that's why I asked you to post isolinux.cfg for redhat dvd so we can hack at it

The links you have sent me tells me to mount the iso on the flash drive which i don't want to do.
If I could do that it would have been a lot easier to do with extlinux just install the bootlaoder and change the name of isolinux.cfg to extlinux.conf(have tried this and it works for my iso)
But this I cannot do.
I don't want to boot fedora via an ISO i want to boot the ISO

I think their just mounting the iso temporarily to copy the kernel/initrd
so the kernel/initrd get booted, then it mounts the iso as read-only and uses the squashfs, etc
as the main system

see the cp command
and umount?