I do not know about mounting an iso to a partition to boot from it but you could use dd to copy the iso to the partition.
Code:
dd if=/location/of/iso/file.iso of=/dev/partition
for example if I want to load linux.iso on partition 1 of SDA
Code:
dd if=linux.iso of=/dev/sda1
Not exactly sure how you would make the machine boot from that particular partition istead of another partition. you might be possible to modify grub or lilo to point to the partition I guess.