Quote Originally Posted by doobs
My laptop's main OS is WinXP, but I'm looking to boot ISOs from the HDD (many knoppix-based, but not all). I already have Grub installed (from a botched Gentoo install) and an EXT2 partition (/dev/hda2). I've perused this thread, but I'm still a little confused. If I copy the ISOs to my NTFS partition, I'll need a special version of Grub, yes? And I'm also not guaranteed compatibility - especially older Knoppix-based distros, 2.6 kernels, etc., right? So, would I be better off copying the ISOs to my EXT2 partition? And if so, should I use the existing Grub install I have now? Would grub be able to handle menu selection of multiple ISO images? How do I configure that?Thanks for your help!
Well, grldr (grub flavour started from a XP/NT boot loader) is required to read data (kernel and initrd file) from a ntfs partition.
Once the kernel is started, the initrd_ntfs ramdisk is required to both boot from a iso file and read the iso data from the ntfs partition. So if you have already grub as a bootloader and are willing to boot from an ext2/3 partition, the only thing you need is the initrd_ntfs file to have the option to boot from a iso file. You obviously need to add some entry lines into your grub menu.lst and add the iso, kernel and initrd_ntfs files somewhere in your ext2 partition and have the apropriate path for these files in your menu.lst. Hope this help, Gilles