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. (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.