booting from ISO on hard drive

[rwcitek]

I tried:
knoppix bootfrom=/dev/hda1/knx.iso debug
Does not work. I get an error that says it cannot find the file. I'm thinking that it cannot find the image because the image is on a NTFS partition.

Knoppix can mount and read an NTFS partition just fine. The above bootfrom= should have worked; I do it on my WinXP machines all the time. I can only think of three possible reasons why it would not work:

1) /dev/hda1 is not the C:\ drive (that would be odd)
2) the image is not in the root directory on C:\
3) the image is not named knx.iso

If you want to explore this further, boot up Knoppix from the CD and then type the following:

cat /proc/partitions
fdisk -l /dev/hda

and post the results.

I also tried:
bootfrom=/dev/hda5/knoppix/knx.iso (note, I left out the debug option)
The good new is that this worked. The bad news is that I can't write to this partition when I boot from it.

That's great news. You should be able to read and write to the FAT32 partition. There is a trick to doing that when you have your image on the same partition. I don't recall off the top of my head. But I'll post later when I am at a Windows machine. In short, it can be done and you don't have to repartition the FAT32 partition.

Also, I don't see how the above (i.e. "bootfrom=/dev/hda5/knoppix/knx.iso") is any different than what I initially tried (i.e. "knoppix bootfrom=/dev/hda5/knoppix/*.iso")

You specified the full filename and not a pattern. For some reason patterns are not working. If you wish to delve into the code and debug why this is, have a look at the script /etc/init.d/knoppix-autoconfig

BTW, I reread your original post and realized you are using Knoppix 3.9. I had some issues with 3.9, especially when using unionfs and apt-get. So, I moved back to 3.8.2. Just a heads up.

Regards,
- Robert
http://www.cwelug.org/