RE: Booting CD's with GRUB

[Treutwein Bernhard]

Hi,

AFAIK the problem with CD-booting is how the BIOS 
remaps the CD according to the El Torito specification 
for bootable CDROMs.

There is some patch for Grub 0.93 to support ISO9660 directly
http://mail.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-grub/2003-01/msg00130.html


The following search results might also give some more hints
http://mail.gnu.org/archive/cgi-bin/namazu.cgi?query=CD+no+emulation&submit=S
earch%21&idxname=bug-grub&max=100&result=normal&sort=date%3Alate

Some pointer although a bit MS tendentially 
                http://www.nu2.nu/bootablecd/
--
        Bernhard Treutwein, IuK, Ref. III A 3
        Bernhard.Treutwein(at)verwaltung uni-muenchen de

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Quazgaa Scwhaa [mailto:address@hidden 
> Sent: Friday, August 08, 2003 8:02 AM
> To: address@hidden
> Subject: Booting CD's with GRUB
> 
> 
> First off it appears to me to not be currently possible to 
> boot a cd with grub?  

hmm, it is possible, when a image containing Grub is burned
on the CD, but I guess you think about booting into a CD,
from a Grub which sits on a floppy or hard disk. This
might be possible, if the bootable CD is in the drive.

I know only for floppy emulation:
If you boot from a CD with Grub in floppy emulation (e.g.
a Caldera image see
ftp://ftp.fsn.hu/pub/CDROM-Images/caldera/OpenLinux/3.1.1/Workstation/OpenLin
ux-3.1.1-workstation-CD1.iso, I do not know about Mandrake), then your 
real floppy will move up (fd0 -> fd1 in Grub, A: -> B: in DOS) 
and the floppy image on the CD will be fd0 (A:). Now you
can chainload into a Grub (or an OS) on (hdx,y), (fdx) etc.
(Beware, older versions of Grub apparenty had a different,
quite slow method of detecting devices, I just grabbed an
old Caldera beta - the times Caldera wasn't fighting against
linux, but providing coopetition :-).


> Secondly is anyone planning to add 
> support for doing so, and most importantly, since im sure 
> the answer to both questions is no, im wondering if someone 
> will point me in the right direction for writing a cd driver 
> for grub.  It seems the current behavior is to ignore any cd 
> drives so i guess that would have to be changed, and anything 
> else that would need to be done?
> 

see pointers above. Have fun

        Bernhard Treutwein