Crazy suggestion (and booting from mounted linux live CD's without using a CD drive)

[billprozac]

Gotta say that I don't know what i would do without DT. You guys rock.

Here is the suggestion. I have been trying to evaluate some live CD's for a network appliance I am building. While LiveCDs are great, the problem is that they require a...well, CD. Some of them have options to install to HD, but it occured to me that it would be awesome if there was a utility that would boot DOS, load a driver, mount an ISO file to a drive and then boot from it. Such a utility would certainly be one of the single greatest tools ever developed as people could bott CD images from flash drives, menu support would allow a dvd with multiple images to boot, liveCD based systems could upgrade simply by replacing a single ISO file.

I know this is off track fro the current project, but I wish you guys would consider it.

[Copytrooper]

Not likely, 'cause Daemon Tools is Windows based only.

[me262]

Re: Crazy suggestion but would be awesome

...it would be awesome if there was a utility that would boot DOS, load a driver, mount an ISO file to a drive and then boot from it

You should then check out isolinux (part of syslinux). I use that for a multiple floppy image boot cd, but I think that it can be adapted to CD images. How much memory do you have in those things? ^_^

[Chocky]

Most LiveCDs contain some operating system, linux, windows etc. All of these systems are working with CD via their own drivers. So, after loading systems core from emulated CD, these systems will load their drivers, which will fail to find CD-ROM and they will stop booting. To use LiveCDs withoun CD-ROM you need to emulate not only CD-ROM, but whole PC. Look to VMWare (commercial) or Bochs (this one is opensource).

[dante777]

does VMWare do that out of Windows OS?

[Chocky]

VMWare works at least on Windows and Linux. "Guest" operating system (i.e., which works on virtual PC,) can be almost any system, supporting x86.

[dante777]

yes, great piece of work.
anyway it cant be used to boot directly from an image file before load any OS.
is there any motherboard or BIOS which can recognize the file system and boot from an image residing there?

[Chocky]

yes, great piece of work.
anyway it cant be used to boot directly from an image file before load any OS.
is there any motherboard or BIOS which can recognize the file system and boot from an image residing there?

There are numerous bios extenders available, for example, which grant PCs with old BIOSes to break through 8GB barier, so, creating another one wouldn't problem.
BIOS is a one thing and OS driver is another. Windows 9x were able to use BIOS's to work with disks when they failed to load own driver, but other can't. When you're installing windows XP, it prompts you to press F6 to give it specific driver for HDD controler. You cannot install Windows NT and above to HDD attached nonstandard controler, because windows using BIOS drive access in early boot stage only. Think about image as an nonstandard controler, requiring driver. Maybe there is a way to use some kind of "hack" to make specific liveCD load your driver (for example - hit or emulate F6 hitting for XP), maybe you can edit liveCD image and add such driver to it, but in general this problem is unresolvable. So, if you want to be able to load almost any liveCD without CD-drive you have to install some OS, PC emulator, and load liveCDs in emulator's window. Or buy CD-drive, of course .
And, I forget to mention, you can't use VMWare's way if you need liveCD to work with PC hardware. For example, you cannot flash you BIOS with bootable ISO and so on.

[Dllfile]

VirtualPC does this as well, made by MS of course, rights were bought by MS from another company who origionally developed it, but the origional employees now work for MS to continue the project.

It is not a bad program at all, I use it to test OS's before deciding to make them permanant, such as the many different Linux flavors, as well as LiveCD's like Knoppix.

It can mount an iso image so there is not even the need to mount an image to virtual cd software first, but you can however use a virtual cd software such as Daemon-Tools to mount several images into VirtualPC.

Not sure if that is what your looking for, but there is trial versions available from MS which you can give a go and see what you think.

Best of all you never have to leave your current booted Windows OS to use it. And you can boot and create as many virtual Operating systems as your system can handle. As well as set different priorities such as give more idle time to forward applications or giving equal cpu time to all, ect.. Anyhow, just a suggestion, hope it helps at least.