Folks: Hello. I'm dangerously close to completing a nice little (emphasis on little) project, but I'm stumped and hope help is forthcoming here at LQ. I want to combine an existing Linux LiveCD (specifically, DSL) w/ a WinPE CD. Here's my menu.lst:

I simply want to boot the WinPE loader or alternatively, boot the loader for ISOLINUX, so that its menu and splash are displayed. The menu displays, but both menu picks crashed the PC. Without the '--force' clause, I get Error 13: 'an supported or invalid executable format.' Replace chainloader w/ kernel and there's another error.

What gives ? Tried GRUB4DOS, more complexity for something that's supposed to be simple. The above menu never went anywhere (under G4D), bec additional (non-standard) commands are needed to access the CD-ROM.

I'm really not understanding why this isn't a no-brainer w/ the 'GRand Unified Bootloader.' TIA....MR

Go to http://applications.linux.com/articl...&tid=47&tid=13.

Under "Related Links", "download the script" and "a script" should be of particular interest to you.

It's all about how to have multiple bootable isos on one dvd, with grub as the bootloader. "a script" has the instructions on how to organize grub and the iso before burning them to disk.

For those struggling to make GRUB (0.97) work, here are some things to consider. I'm on the verge of bailing (on GRUB), bec for all of its power, it doesn't do simple things easily. I really want to use it and perhaps in the future I'll give it another try, but check this out:

1) I wanted to use GRUB bec it offered the pos of a splash screen using what I thought was a more-or-less std image fmt. Well, maybe all Linux apps make XPM files the way GRUB wants them, but I couldn't find a Windows app that would. Ok, that's life. That was after I discovered I was spinning my wheels for while, bec the splashimage cmd isn't even part of the std GRUB distro !

2) The GRand Unified Bootloader has no facility to load and execute a simple 2KB boot sector ! I can script all kinds of elaborate and esoteric boot sequences, but booting from a simple 2KB boot sector is impossible. I even went as far as creating a bootable SYSLINUX floppy image and supplied it w/ a single command in SYSLINUX.CFG: 'default /bootsect.bin' to indirectly boot WinPE/BartPE, launched using MEMDISK. Crashed and burned.

3) The ABSOLUTE show-stopper was trying to get DSL to run from my GRUB menu. I spent A LOT OF HOURS on this. To make a long story short, GRUB doesn't behave like LINUX itself WRT to devices. Normally, Linux will detect and make available all devices in a PC, that is assuming one doesn't explicitly disable drivers/modules (at boot time.) One must tell GRUB to explicitly make available certain relavent devices. Everytime I tried to launch DSL from GRUB, it would load the kernel and initial ramdisk image, then stop dead bec it couldn't find KNOPPIX. It couldn't find the KNOPPIX sub-dir bec it only saw a single optical drive in the system and NEVER detected the drive w/ the OS ! This happened whether I was testing under VMWare or from a real CD-R booting on the native PC.

I switched back to making an ISO booting via the ISOLINUX boot loader. I had an operational disc immediately ! Booting from the ISO made from the ISOLINUX loader, I watched it search /dev/scd0 for KNOPPIX, then FIND it straight away on /dev/scd1 !

This isn't intended as a slam or a rant, it's simply been a very long forty-eight hours ! If I can save one person a few hours worth of grief by posting this misery, it will not have been a complete waste of time....