Booting from iso image on hd for testing purposes?

[thehigherentity]

I have been reading articles all over the net, how people are booting their Linux distributions from iso images on their hd’s
I have even tried a number of the explanations and howto’s with no luck.

Is it actually possible to do this? As I have also found many forums saying its not possible!

What I want to do is set-up a boot in my grub menu called test and have an iso file on my hd called “test.iso�
What I was hoping I could do with this is download different live disks and change the name to test.iso overwriting the
test image and reboot from the new iso to test the distribution without the hassle of burning cd’s etc

I would really like to do this with grub if that is possible and don’t really want to have the iso image extracted in anyway

Could someone talk me through this if it is indeed possible or point me to an up-to-date explanation as I have become more confused looking round google then I first was when I started lol

Thanks in advance
Stephen

[Harry Kuhman]

Is it actually possible to do this? As I have also found many forums saying its not possible!

It may not be posiable for other forums, but it happens here.

Use the search feature to search through the old post, particularly a user named ruymbeke who is quite an expert on this. It's easy enough to do if you have a CD also, but ruymbeke has figured out how to bypass that.

It's no substitute for a real Debian hard disk install, but it's quite effective for what it is.

[thehigherentity]

thanks for the info, I will have a search through now...

[ockham23]

Here's how to do it with Kanotix; works like a charm: http://kanotix.com/FAQ-id_cat-63.html#q298
If you have at least 1 gig of RAM, you can combine "fromiso" and "toram" cheat codes.