OdyDasa

It’s quiet long time ago, for having and idea of directly booting an ISO file (CD/ DVD image) of a instaler CD or LiveCD, like Ubuntu CD, instead burn it to the disc or extract the content into UFD (USB flash disk) or hardisk. Now, we can do it using GNU GRUB (“GRUB” for short) as a boot loader package from the GNU Project (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_GRUB).

Main Files: Kernel, RAM disk, ISO file

We will use the files from Linux installer, it’s kernel and it’s initial root filesystem (RAM disk or intrd image). This initrd image contains a lot of executables and drivers for mounting the real root filesystem. When real real root filesystem is mountet, the initrd is unounted, then the memory is freed. Both files are named differently in different distros. Find it it Table 1 for the names.

Now, here we are, preparing our UFD for booting from ISO file, and make it from Windows. In this case we will use kernel and initrd image from Ubuntu 9.04, and try to boot Ubuntu.
So, we can use:

• Grub installer.
  There are some tools to make it under Windows to make a UFD to be Grub bootable, e.g. grub4dos (https://sourceforge.net/projects/grub4dos, https://gna.org/projects/grub4dos/ or http://sarovar.org/projects/grub4dos/), including WinGrub and grubinst in it.
  But, I prefer to use WinSetupFromUSB (http://www.msfn.org/board/install-usb-winsetupfromusb-gui-t120444.html). For advance usage, we even can use this to install multiple boot of several Windows and Linux.
• Ubuntu ISO, you can download from any repository you like, e.g.
  http://releases.ubuntu.com/jaunty/ubuntu-9.04-desktop-i386.iso
• Kernel and initrd image files from Ubuntu CD ISO (ubuntu-9.04-desktop-i386.iso)
  You can open ISO file with WinRAR.
• • vmlinuz
  • initrd.gz

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