boot .iso

[scotter86]

Hi everyone, I'm trying to "burn","mount" what ever you want to call it, an .iso file to a hard disk partition. What I'm trying to do is get this iso on a partition and boot it much like I would a cd. I saw a couple examples where it was able to work using a boot loader, and just pointing to the iso, but i want to do it with out using a boot loader. The iso is just a linux live cd, but I was curious weather or not this is actually possible.

Now I know you cant just copy the iso to a cd to make it work, you have to burn the iso. I know there's a difference between the two, but I'm not 100% sure what it is, does burning the iso extract the iso, or something else really cool that i dont know about yet?

I would have to assume this would be possible, since you can burn an iso to a cd and the cd is bootable, no boot loader needed. Basically what i'm looking to do is create a second partition that acts like a recovery partition on newer computers, but the "recovery partition" would essentially be the live cd.

The hard drive is new. Using windows, I formated a 1GB partition using FAT32.

Hope that's not too confusing, wasn't exactly sure how to phrase it. But any input would be greatly appreciated, thanks in advance.

Scotter86

[Curtis Rutland]

There is actually a bootloader on live CDs. Most use isolinux.

ISOs are disk images. From Wiki:

As would any other archive, ISO image includes all the data of files contained on the archived CD/DVD. They are stored in an uncompressed format. In addition to data of the files it also contains all the filesystem metadata, including boot code, structures, and attributes.

So in a way they are archives, but they are more than just that, they are an image.

CDs use a different filesystem than you do on hard drives, so I don't think that there is a way to write an ISO to a HDD partition like you want. But you could install your live distro to that partition, and set grub to boot to windows first.

Hope that helps!