Oh! I have an answer for that. Let me check my notes. I also have an answer for how to mount the ISO file as if its a CDROM when actually it's just a file on your hard drive. I'll provide both within a day. I have to dig for this stuff.

I'll look forward, but I know how to mount an iso file already: mount -o loop file.iso /mnt/foo

But making .iso's is weird, so any help on that would be great

dylunio

mkisofs

Ah, thanks a_thing

Knowing that I"ve managed to make a CD with mkisofs -no-emul-boot -boot-load-size 4 -boot-info-table -r -b isolinux/isolinux.bin -c isolinux/boot.catalog -o ubuntu.iso ubuntu-cd

dylunio

mount -t iso9660 -o loop "/media/WDC USB2/torrent/ubuntu-5.10-install-i386.iso" /cdrom

is what I used

What about mounting an iso image and booting off of it?

Maybe it sounds crazy, but considering how many crazy things are already possible maybe this would be too.

Maybe it can be made as a procedure that would do the following:

1.) make a temporarily partition in an empty space of the disk that the program would detect and format it as a filesystem of the iso (normal CD file system)
2.) Decompress iso to that partition essentially making that partition appear as if it was a mounted bootable CD
3.) alter grub or lilo configuration to include the new boot option from that mounted virtual CD

Then it would ask you to reboot after which you'd be normally greeted with a boot screen with the option to boot from the newly created "virtual CD". It would boot just like any bootable liveCD. You can even install an operating system this way without burning on an actual CD, which might be great when you're just trying out a distro.

I imagine this could be done with a bash script.

What do you think? Any holes in the theory?

For trying out distros I usually use QEmu. That's a great thing. Runs quite fast and works really fine, except that it doesn't compile on my new system because I'm using GCC 4.1.
But it's even fast enough to have an emulated Windoze running if you need an IE to test your website.
In the office I have FreeBSD- and Debian-images if I want to play a little with these.

Here's how to get Winders and QEMU going on Ubuntu Breezy.

I have never attempted this though. Instead, I have a regular, separate Winders system and I use tsclient/rdesktop to interact with it for testing my websites through Internet Exploder.

Hmm that went a bit offtopic maybe. I'm not interested in windows anymore anyway.

Qemu also sounds nice, but I wasn't thinking of that either. I just thought it would be cool to boot an iso off a hard drive, even if that ends up not as useful as I may have thought.

Thanks for the infos though.

iirc you can boot iso's off a hard drive but you need other media to boot the .iso file. I think it's used offten when you have an OS and you want to install a CD distro and you only have a floppy drive - well something like that.