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Showing posts from February, 2016

Booting From an ISO image using GRUB

Sometimes, it's handy to use a specialized boot environment on your system. Examples include SpinRite , GParted , TRK , FalconFour's Ultimate Boot CD and others . Typically, you have a CD or DVD of that environment, insert it and boot from that. Assuming that your own system isn't borked, it is possible to use GRUB to load the ISO image and boot from that. Here's how . . . The special software that allows you to boot from an ISO image on your drive is SYSLINUX . While it is a complete boot system, mostly noted for its ability to boot from MS-DOS and MS Windows FAT filesystems, it contains a program named MEMDISK . NOTE: While I am focusing on Linux systems, SYSLINUX and MEMDISK have MS Windows  versions, so with a careful reading of the documents you can do the same thing on a MS Windows computer. Intended primarily to allow you to boot legacy operating systems, it also allows you to boot from floppy disk images, hard drive images and ISO images. To u...