Seen something like this somewhere but can't remember exactly what it was.

How can linux be installed into one big file that resides on a FAT filesystem?

Note: not an .iso that is read-only, but a file that can be written to.

This is worth experimenting with...


If my knowlenge serves me well, you could possibly do it.. I know that flash drives use the FAT filesystem, and there are already several distributions that boot from thumbdrive. As for a hard drive that is formatted to the FAT filesystem, I think that the same principal applies...

Like the old ZipSlack?

Zipslack used umsdos and the files were not in a file but normal folder. It still works great.

The other deal is something that BeOS did. They were able to go from dos to BeOS on a booted system with loadlin. It kicked out command.com and put in it's interpreter and it looked for a virtual filesystem.

I might have seen a similar deal with linux but it would have to be an older one.


There still is virtual machines and they use a virtual filesystem in a file.


Then you may want to look at pendrivelinux.com for how they use grub4dos to boot to an iso live cd. I think they were able to use grub4dos to boot to some other filesystem.