* Philip Hands <phil@hands.com> [20090628 01:25]: > I've been trying to build a versatile USB stick, with the imntent that > it be able to choose between various images at a grub prompt. Some > .iso images (i.e. http://partedmagic.com/) are happy with this setup, > becasue once booted (via grub4dos's ability to map a .iso and boot it) > they look around for the image they came from and loop mount it, in much > the same way as debian-live looks for its .squashfs > debian-live does not appear to have this ability at present, although > given that it can find the .squashfs I'd guess it's not going to be > too hard to add, but I'm afraid my cursory glance over the code did not > reveal the place where it should be added. JFTR: http://git.grml.org/?p=live-initramfs-grml.git;a=blob;f=debian/patches/06_support_fromiso_isofrom.dpatch;hb=HEAD http://git.grml.org/?p=live-initramfs-grml.git;a=blob;f=debian/patches/07_support_findiso.dpatch;hb=HEAD should basically do what you want. Do I understand it right that the partedmagic live system doesn't require *any* additional bootoptions at all to boot the ISO directly from USB (running losetup & CO on it's own)? [...] > There is at least one gotcha though -- grub will often fail to map an > image if it's fragmented, so you're liable to have to copy all the images > off the stick, delete them and then write them back to make it happy. > The --mem option to grub's map command is supposed to handle that case, > by copying the image to ram, but I've not had a lot of luck with that. > Note that when I say grub here I'm talking about grub4dos which is pretty > much the same as grub2, but seems to deal with the vagaries of USB-ZIP > rather better than grub2 at the moment. You mention it in your blog article http://wiki.hands.com//howto/ultimate-usb-stick/#gettingdebian-livetorun already, but JFTR: grub2 with loopback option doesn't have the fragmentation problem (though grub2 was/is kind of broken in current Debian/unstable). What systems do you have that support USB-ZIP only? regards, -mika-
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