Brilliant idea? Boot CD ISO selecter

I've read many, many relatively complicated tutorials on how to boot an ISO straight off of the hard drive. In a potentially brilliant fit of despair, I hit upon it... a LiveCD/boot CD that where you could key in the location (eventually) manually, and then boot the ISO.

Concept:

1. Boot the CD (some tiny console linux setup)
2. Mount partition (IE, mount /dev/hda1 /folder1)
3. start a script for selecting the iso
4. enter the ISO location
5. Mount the iso with a loop (mount install.iso /folder2 -o loop)
5. boot that ISO

Couldn't that be done? I don't think I could do it, but shouldn't that be possible? It would seemingly be almost the same as a normal LiveCD.

The problem here are the last two steps:

5. Mount the iso with a loop (mount install.iso /folder2 -o loop) 5. boot that ISO

Perhaps it is ironic that they are numbered that way actually...

You see, it is easy to mount an ISO via the loopback file system. But the trick is somehow booting that from inside of a running Linux system.

As far as I know, that is as near to impossible as something can get under Linux. If it was an ISO of a Linux system, then you could maybe do some trickery with chroot, but if it was say, a Windows XP install ISO, then that is a whole other story.

Oops, my bad. I did 5b first, and then thought of 5a later. Oops!

I've heard many success stories of booting ISO's though, so this has got to be possible in one way or another.

Originally Posted by MS3FGX The problem here are the last two steps: Perhaps it is ironic that they are numbered that way actually... You see, it is easy to mount an ISO via the loopback file system. But the trick is somehow booting that from inside of a running Linux system. As far as I know, that is as near to impossible as something can get under Linux. If it was an ISO of a Linux system, then you could maybe do some trickery with chroot, but if it was say, a Windows XP install ISO, then that is a whole other story.

Perhaps someone could create a bootloader that recognizes iso files on already recognized partitions.

That's more or less what I was thinking of, I just thought it would be neat to have a boot-disk you could use, rather than screwing up your existing grub/lilo/whatever.

Signing off for the night!