Ok, I have been working through this a bit in my spare time. I have had some luck but need others to test it so we know it is repeatable.

My USB is setup this way
DebianLive (the USB's name)
/boot/grub/
/debian_live_gnome_squeeze_amd64/
/debian_live_gnome_squeeze_i386/
/debian_live_kde_squeeze_amd64/
and on and on till I have each Debian Desktop environment in both amd64 and i386 in its own folder.

Now my grub.cfg is setup like this
The other Desktop environments have similar entries just changing gnome for kde etc and amd64 for i386.

Now in each folder (e.g. /debian_live_gnome_squeeze_amd64/) I placed the iso's initrd.lz initrd.img and vmlinuz which I extracted from burned dvds and I also placed the iso itself. So far this is working for me I have have only tested the Live image and have not tried installing from it because I have a separate install menu entry. If you try this you will have to make changes on things like the "fromiso=" entry, the locales entry, the timezone entry, and possibly the keyboard entry.

Give it a try and tell me how it goes for you.

OK you little bugger, you have been a busy boy.

You have two entries there. Are both of them needed to boot one ISO or is the second for something else?

I want to get what you are doing straight as I will be booting from my HDD. I will obviously have to do some editing of my own.

For instance I doubt I need the "quickusbmodules" from yours but something quite different to fit my setup.

Is the install you are booting from on the HDD? And all you have on the USB stick is the ISO files?

It may be a couple of days yet before I have a chance but this looks crazy enough to try. If nothing else I could try putting them over on my external enclosure and using your entry straight up.

The entire setup is on a 16GB usb flash drive. I have a 1TB USB-HDD that I would really like to do this on as well because I have the full Squeeze repository on it and it will make installs and updates so easy.

Each iso is in its own folder, each folder also has a vmlinuz and 2 initrd. The initrd.img is for the Live image and is in the /live/ folder on the iso, while the initrd.gz is for the text based installer (Debian Installer) and is in the /install/ folder on the iso. If you look at the entries you will see the difference in the initrd's. Both initrd's and the vmlinuz must be in the folder with the iso because they initialise the different parts of the iso.

I just realised you can use archive manager (file roller) to extract the files instead of having to burn the iso to a disk and then copy them off a disk.

I am going to work on a different "fromiso=" path, mainly because I cannot for the life of me remember how I come to it as I did it a week ago and have only just got the chance to test it. I have never really gotten a grip of uuid's anyway so I'm hoping another method will work just as well.

Here is my new modified and tested Grub menu entry for the DebianLive iso. I have removed the uuid reference. Compare this version with the one above and see if it is easier for you.

I just remembered how I identified the uuid for the USB flash drive.
In a terminal type
This then gave the output
So you can see that the "fromiso=" entry just uses "/dev/disk/by-uuid/" adds the uuid "D9F4-753A/" and then the folder path "debian_live_gnome_squeeze_amd64/debian-live-6.0.1-amd64-gnome-desktop.iso" and the boot options.

I am thinking the uuid method, while more difficult initially to work out, is easier to use in the long term especially if you have multiple usb drives connected for example a multiboot usb flash drive for installations and a usb-hdd with a full repository. If you connect them both the multiboot usb may not necessarily be sdb1 so your grub entry will be wrong but a uuid entry will remain the same regardless of what else is connected.

Very busy indeed.

I was pretty unsure about uuid being a good thing until I did a bunch of changes in my partition table. Figured that straightening out all the fstab files would be a bugger.

As partition was no longer described as /dev/sdc12 (now changed to 9) it was no problem at all as the partition was defined by uuid which, of coarse, had not changed. Sold me on it writer there.

I did run as root;
To check all the uuids in all 6 fstabs involved in that restructuring to make sure. Waste of a lot of time. Everything was cool.

That code is what I have always used to get my uuid info. Never thought about the /dev/disk info before at all. That may be handy.

Still haven't the time to fool with this. Temperatures in the 90s today. Could be in the 30s just as easy here in Montana. Have a few things left to do before freeze up. Haven't had any snow yet but a few years ago the first snow was on 9-1. Better get my butt back in gear.

We have a long weekend here this weekend and its raining so apart from some inside jobs I have plenty of time to work through my list of Debian and Gnome jobs. Our weather is a pain as well, 28 celcius (about 82f I think) a little over a week ago and now we are lucky to get into the mid teens celcius (about 50f)and we are getting the odd bit of hail from storm cells floating over. Have plenty to do outside but not risking getting hit by balls of ice nor lightning so I'm playing inside with sid.

Getting to watch plenty of football Finals (Union) and Grandfinals (AFL, League) to and next weekend is motor racing so it can rain here then to

I don't know if this thread is still active, but I finally have been able to boot debian-live-6.0.3-amd64-desktop.iso.
I recently was trying to get BackTrack5 Linux to boot on a multiboot system and after reading in a Ubuntu help forum, I found out that you need to
extract vmlinuz and initrd files from the iso (right click, use archive manager and extract -- or "mount -o loop debian.iso /mnt"). So what I did was to extract the "live" directory from the iso. Then I placed it in the root of the usb drive; I also extracted the other files/directories from the iso and placed them all in the "live" directory on the usb drive (I'm not sure if this last step is necessary). Finally, I placed a copy of the iso in the same directory ("live").
I booted from the usb flash drive -- and voila, Debian booted right up.

The following is a copy of the menuentry for Debian (for the grub.cfg file):

menuentry "debian 64 bit live" {
linux /live/vmlinuz iso-scan/filename=/live/debian-live-6.0.3-amd64-gnome-desktop.iso BOOT=live boot=live live-config nopersistent rw --
initrd /live/initrd.img
}

Notice that there is no "loopback" line and there is no "loop" for the linux and initrd lines. You probably can make changes/updates stick by creating a second partition on the usb flashdrive using ext2 and labeling it "live-rw". You would also have to change "nopersistent" (at the end of the "linux" line above) to "persistent" (no quotation marks). I had sent in a bug report to Debian -- and then I retracted it.

Hope someone can use this info (by the way, I have a multiboot grub2 usb drive with the most common distributions and they all work fine: Debian Squeeze 64 bit, Ubuntu 10.10 and 11.10, BackTrack5, Tiny Core 4.2, Fedora 16, AVG Rescue, Ophcrack XP and Vista, System Rescue CD 2.4.1, Lucid Puppy 5.2.8, Grml small and regular 2011.12).

That is great info. Thanks.

Been meaning to try this and just have not had a chance and now there is more to go on.

One thing I have noticed is that both of you do not have the instruction "noprompt" in your menu entries.

You are not getting the prompt to remove the CD and hit enter when you reboot?

I have tried many different menuentries (some that included noprompt). Yes, when I shut down Debian live, I get the message "remove usb drive and press enter".
I, of course, will tweak my menuentry info for Debian -- like local time, etc. By the way, I made BackTrack5 persistent by adding "persistent rw" on the linux line (and with a second partition labeled "casper-rw). I am fairly sure that the same thing can be done with Debian live (with a partition labeled "live-rw").

For me, Debian live was a tough nut to crack -- I spent hours researching, fiddling, tweaking, etc. Ubuntu was by far the easiest, but I don't like the way Ubuntu works with persistence (I could not undate Ubuntu without some problems and bugs). I have another Debian install (Debian-live usb-hdd image) that I dd-ed to a usb drive and with persistence. I was able to update, install anything and everything I needed without a hitch (but doing it that way, I could not make it multiboot).

I boot my ISO files from my HDD.

I know that sometime in the last year I booted Ubuntu, with persistence, and it worked fine. Seems to be the only menu entry that I did not keep in file though.

Have to admit that is probably due to lack of interest in persistence. I just want to be able to boot the things to play with and see what they look like. Sometimes I do need to add something but have never cared if it persisted or not.

Don't know what version of Ubuntu you had trouble with but they were the first to really try and make ISO booting work smoothly. They continue to mess with the boot cycle and plymouth however and some hardware has more trouble with some versions than other hardware. Usually completely different hardware with each release.

I have Ubuntu 10.10 and 11.10 (and that might have been the problem because I neglected to place "nopersistent" on one of them). I added multiverse to the apt source list, updated, and installed some multimedia apps. Then the system (at least apt-get) seemed broken -- sudo no longer worked, there was an error icon on the top panel(I forget what the error message said). Recently I wiped out data in the casper-rw partition so I could use it for BackTrack. Now Ubuntu is no longer broken, but needless to say all updates and changes are gone.

As far as my Debian live iso, I have tweaked the menu entry and now system time is correct (for Pacific region) and I no longer get the "please remove the usb drive". However, when I reboot, it reboots back into the Debian live on the usb drive, so I have to shutdown system to get back to my regular Debian Squeeze (on my hard drive). Seems a little strange.

Here is the current menu entry:

menuentry "debian 64 bit live" {
linux /live/vmlinuz iso-scan/filename=/live/debian-live-6.0.3-amd64-gnome-desktop.iso BOOT=live boot=live live-config nopersistent rw noeject noprompt live-config.timezone=America/Los_Angeles --
initrd /live/initrd.img
}

Next I am going to take out all the files and directories (except the original ones and the iso itself) from the "live" directory on my usb flashdrive root to see if it still boots. I believe it will.

I actually haven't done anymore with this as my usb flash just works so well I didn;t want to stuff around with it. I do need to update to 6.0.4 though because it is still using 6.0.1. I'm hoping that when I replace the iso images nothing, apart from menu entries, will really need to change.

k3lt01,

I take it that you got Debian-live iso (6.0.1) to boot on a multiboot grub2 usb drive. I used similar grub2 menus to yours (the one that you downloaded to LinuxQuestions on 10/1/11) and could not get 6.0.3 to start up (it booted but half way through terminal stated that a Debian live iso could not be found -- and I was instructed to submit a bug on live-boot, which I did)

Yes I have the Debian Live 6.0.1.

I used much of the code from information I gathered over the net and even used Multisystem on an old ubuntu install, which made a similar Grub entry, to verify it would work.