bootfrom?

[A. Jorge Garcia]

Just wondering if anyone has used the bootfrom cheatcode to boot ISOs other than KNOPPIX?

TIA,
AJG

[j.drake]

Why would you assume that the programs in the other ISOs would even know what that command meant? Maybe I'm missing something.

jd

[UnderScore]

I haven't tried that. However I did notice that Kanotix has a great bootmenu/splash with grub menu entries that allow you to boot from hda, hdb and/or have grub use a different grub.conf. I gather that it would allow you to boot the existing hda with a messedup MBR as long as it could find the grub.conf and the appropriate kernel.

[A. Jorge Garcia]

Well, I thought that bootfrom was used from a liveCD boot to boot from a new ISO on a hdd, right? Does that ISO have to be KNOPPIX or can it be, say, a QUANTIAN or DAMN-SMALL-LINUX or some other ISO?

TIA,
AJG

[eco2geek]

That would depend on whether the authors of these "Knoppix variants" kept and/or modified the scripts that allow the use of the "bootfrom" cheatcode.

Quantian allows "bootfrom". Its author explains how to use the "bootfrom" cheatcode here (http://dirk.eddelbuettel.com/quantian/howto_winboot.html). (It's sort of convoluted, in that you have to download clusterKnoppix and burn it to CD in order to have something to boot from...if you don't have a DVD burner.)

Damn Small Linux has its own modified set of cheatcodes, but includes "bootfrom".

[A. Jorge Garcia]

Right, that howto on the QUANTIAN website is what got me started thinking about this. I think Dirk goes into all this detail about having a CLUSTERKNOPPIX liveCD just to boot any new QUANTIAN ISO download with the bootfrom cheat.

Can't I just use any liveCD boot that has the bootfrom cheatcode (most all KNOPPIX remasters do) to boot any live Linix ISO? I guess I don't have to as most my PCs have been knoopix-installer'ed so I could just mount an ISO as another ro fs, right?

Regards,
AJG

[eco2geek]

Mounting an ISO -- e.g. "mount -t iso9660 /path/to/file.iso /mnt/test -o loop,ro" -- will certainly give you access to the contents of that ISO, but it's different than actually booting from it.

(I think what you can do, although I personally have yet to try this out, is to copy the "compressed loop" file, /KNOPPIX/KNOPPIX, to your hard drive and "chroot" into it.)

You can't just use any old kernel/miniroot to start up a Knoppix remaster. They have to match the kernel version that the remaster uses.

There's plenty of other live Linux CD distros -- Mandrake Move, SuSE, Slax, and PCLinuxOS2K4, for example -- that use different scripts and ways to boot. You would have no success getting them to boot using Knoppix's files.

I haven't played around much with "bootfrom" but I've used "fromhd" a lot.