I am working on an odd little project and I was wondering if anyone knew a way to format a partition on an existing hard drive to iso9960. I tried cfdisk, and it's not listed in the options, and Google-ing is just not giving my any results.

Thanks for your help,

x1101

never heard of it.

for remastering a live cd or bootable cd, you use loop ....eg

or use virtualbox to point to your iso.

I'm actually trying to make it so that I can copy the contents of an ISO to a partition and the boot that "ISO" from the hard drive. But the almost completely on being able to format the partition as ISO-9960

you might try using dd to copy an iso to a bare partition, then using loop to mount it.

ISO-9660 isn't a full file system because it has no write capability and I doubt that you'll be able to format your partition for it.

You could use VMWare for something like that.

when you say boot from hard drive, do you mean once a host system is already booted?

if so I have already mentioned virtualbox, eg booting a knoppix iso image

after installing Vb, create any size hard drive and config it to treat the optical drive as an iso

http://h1.ripway.com/aus9/iso.png

then

http://h1.ripway.com/aus9/vb.png

I guess I'm not being clear, I'm trying to do something totally new. I am working on a way to move the contents of an ISO to a partition on the HD, do some fiddling with grub, and the boot up as if the iso had been burnt to a cd and was running in my drive. Because mounting is un-done when you reboot, that is obviously of no help. But... does dd copy everything bit for bit? because if it does, that might...might work. I know that _in theory_ this should be possible, based on what the U3 drives can do, but figuring out how to do it _in practice_ is where I am having the issue. Once I figure out how to do this I am going to try to script it, and some friends have suggested some other interesting ideas, but I have to find a way to make it work first.
Thanks, and sorry for bring un-clear the first time.

so you want a grub menu to boot an iso?

no knowledge in me but this knoppix cheat code may interest you?

bootfrom=/dev/hda1/KNX.iso
Access image, boot from ISO-Image. - Knoppix V3.4
NOTE: bootfrom needs access to a running Knoppix-System with the same Kernel as the Bootkernel, before it is able to mount the partition / ISO-Image. This should allow a poor mans install from NTFS-Partitions and makes it also possible to boot an ISO-Image directly. You can also use wildcards in the ISO-Filename, but it must be unique. So: If you have just one KNOPPIX.iso on /dev/hda1 you can access it as: bootfrom=/dev/hda1/K*.iso, but if there are several, you need to make clear, which one you want. (Feature added by Fabian Franz.)
CAUTION: The 2.4 kernel that is in the KNOPPIX 3.4 CD does not support the ext3 filesystem so make sure that the ISO is stored in an ext2 filesystem.