Can I boot "Fedora Live" from its ISO located on hard drive

[serge]

Hi to all. Just a quick question: Can I boot The Live version without burning the CD or DVD? In other words, I want to utilize my installed Linux distro (and its Grub) to boot the Live ISO located on some hard drive partition.

Many thanks, and regards,
serge.

[sideways]

I don't think so, not in any obvious way. You can get grub to launch the Anaconda installer by copying the vmlinuz & initrd images from the isolinux directory on the install dvd to /boot and then install from the hard disk iso image using 'linux askmethod', but I don't think you could run a livecd session this way.

You can copy the livecd to a usb device and boot from that

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/FedoraLiveCD/USBHowTo

So it might be possible for someone to work out a clever way of adapting this to enable grub to boot from a hard disk image.

In the end it would probably be easier just to borrow a cd drive and install the livecd normally.

[stevea]

Grub can now handle iso9660 file systems, but it is NOT going to handle one that's embedded in a ext3 fs. Sorry recursive fs hunts are not in the cards for any bootloader. If BIOS IRQ I/O isn't fetching blocks off the ISO grub isn't smart enough to deal with it.

[cable_txg]

If you have VMware, you could boot the iso file and try it out.

[serge]

Thank you all very much. Yes, booting Fedora "non-live" from ISO located on hard drive is trivial. But the "live" ISO seems to be the problem. I'll keep trying and fool around a bit more and will report if anything works.

Many thanks to all,
serge.

[sideways]

I think it would be a good "feature" to enable in grub - booting livecds from an iso image stored on disk, we need to petition the developers.

[Dies]

Originally Posted by serge

Thank you all very much. Yes, booting Fedora "non-live" from ISO located on hard drive is trivial. But the "live" ISO seems to be the problem. I'll keep trying and fool around a bit more and will report if anything works.

Many thanks to all,
serge.

DSL calls it a "Poor Man's Install"

Knoppix supports this, but not sure if it will work with Fedora, in any case if you haven't already looked into the way it's done with Knoppix or DSL than that's probably the place to start.

http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/wiki/i...Frugal_Install

http://www.knoppix.net/wiki/Hd_Based_HowTo

Edit - Sorry, didn't mean to make it sound like those will run directly from the ISO, just that they allow you to boot a "Live CD" without a CD.

[serge]

Hi Dies: Thank you very much for helping me!!! Yes, I tried to "unpack" the Fedora Live ISO (using the #mount -o loop ..." command and then copy the whole content to some partition. Then add the usual stuff to the menu.lst of my running distro to boot this Fedora, but no luck. Maybe, my kernel line in menu.lst is not correct? Any way, I'll keep trying.

Regards,
serge.

[forkbomb]

Originally Posted by sideways

I think it would be a good "feature" to enable in grub - booting livecds from an iso image stored on disk, we need to petition the developers.

Well, go right ahead...

But I think in this case you should check out a virtual machine software of some sort like VirtualBox or VMWare.

Booting a Live ISO from Grub seems silly seeing as how it's a mere step after the BIOS... Maybe it's just me, but I don't see the point. (Unless you have a BIOS that doesn't allow booting from CD.)

[sideways]

Well I assume the problem is he doesn't have a burner, and running in a virtual machine session doesn't allow you to do a permanent install. However, you can get a good idea of LiveCD performance by simply running the iso image with qemu

su -
rpm -Uhv http://rpm.livna.org/livna-release-8.rpm
yum install kmod-kqemu
modprobe kqemu

qemu -m 480 -cdrom Fedora-8-Live-i686.iso &

That gives you 480mb ram for the session, adjust appropriately (I use a little under 512 since it seems more stable on my 1Gb ram system)

[serge]

Thanks sideways: I have a 1GHz computer and qemu is "not practical".
Best regards,
serge.

[royor]

Perhaps you can.
Just be sure that you configure the CDROM to be the iso file,
and the HD configuration must not contain a bootable OS.
It will boot from the virtual CDROM.

Not sure how useful that will be though!

[royor]

Of course, I was assuming that you boot your native OS and run some virtualizer
like VirtualBox.
Sorry of this was "off topic..."

[cheerio158]

Hi,

I'm playing around with rolling my own Fedora8 LiveCD custom spins and cannot get qemu to work properly.

The default top and bottom panels seem to be "off-screen" and I cannot access them. See attached image.

I've tried both command and get the same result:

qemu -m 1024 -cdrom Fedora-8-LiveCD-080127.iso
qemu -m 1024 -vnc localhost:3 -cdrom Fedora-8-LiveCD-080127.iso

This spin when booted from a CD or a USB drive works great!

What is the trick with qemu? (I want to use it to test my spins before burn/installing elsewhere).

[sideways]

Not sure what's causing that behaviour but you could try one or more of the following options: -full-screen, -std-vga, - g <width>x<height>x<depth> (the default is 800x600x15)

(full screen mode can also be toggled with ctrl-alt-f)