[plug] Booting ISO image files

[Bernard Blackham]

On Sat, May 29, 2004 at 12:54:42PM +0800, Trevor Phillips wrote:
> Is there a way to boot an "image" direct from a file, loop-back style, 
> rather than a partition or CD? I have this dream of a magic boot-loader 
> which lists a pile of images (Debian Woody install, Debian Test install, 
> MoviX, Knoppix), and can boot any one on select. Now imagine that on a 
> bootable USB HDD? How hard would it to be to do this?
> 
> The main technical "Gotcha" I can think of is that the images would 
> probably need to be unfragmented on the disk. Perhaps a special partition 
> format that is dedicated to sub-partitioned of other images?

Completely untested theory... If you can have partition tables on
CDs, you could perhaps boot a particular parition (where each
partition is an iso9660 image?)

I might have a play with this in a few weeks. Would be useful for
the installfest for machines without a network card!

Bernard.